


Touch

by AntiKryptonite



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Season 1 and 2, relationship exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntiKryptonite/pseuds/AntiKryptonite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many ways to touch someone — through a hand on a shoulder, a platonic hug, a kiss that can break a curse…or a love that goes deeper, touches the heart buried beneath three centuries of pain and darkness, as well as her own heart, idealistic and compassionate. Belle falls in love with a touch, and with a touch her world is both destroyed and given beauty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Luthien for the kind invite to AO3, and to roberre for the fantastic beta-ing job on the last chapter and for listening to me complain during the rough parts!
> 
> Disclaimer: So…yeah, the entire relationship of Rumplestiltskin and Belle thus far, so there's a LOT of references and dialogue taken from episodes — which were, needless to say, not written by me. No copyright infringement is intended as I explore this beautiful relationship a bit more.

\---

The first time she touches him, it’s an accident. She reaches out to take away his plate (still mostly full, but she thinks it’s because he’s a light eater rather than a statement on her cooking skills) and her hand brushes his sleeve. Her breath catches in her throat, heart pounding in her ears, and only on later reflection will she realize that the leather sleeve is flimsier than it looks.

He freezes, but he is so still anyway that it’s hard to tell just exactly how angry he is. She dares to look up, to meet his gaze with her own red-rimmed eyes, and is surprised when he only tilts his head. There is a curious look to his already curious eyes, perplexity evident in the tiny wrinkles creasing his brow, and she wonders what he finds in her to be so surprising (she’s only an ordinary girl, after all, in a world full of people just like her).

After an instant, his stare grows too much for her and even though she promised herself that she would comport herself with dignity no matter what he asks of her, she finds herself gathering up his plate with a clatter and dipping an awkward curtsey. He hasn’t told her what she should call him so she doesn’t call him anything (he’s not her master even if she serves him, and he’s not a lord even if he lives in a castle, and his name holds power she doesn’t think she wants).

She feels his stare on her all the way through the door.

\---

He gives her small things, tiny gestures, but always from a distance. He scoots a plate of food over toward her when he doesn’t think she’s eating, tosses a pillow at her from his place near the door, tells her she may read the books in her spare time only when he’s safely ensconced on his stool at his spinning wheel. There is always an excuse for the kindnesses, an off-hand comment about caretakers starving themselves to shorten their _forevers,_ a snapped retort that her weeping grates on him, a shrug and a remark about reading a book serving to dust it better than cloths when she dares to ask him why he’s letting her touch such treasures as his small collection of books.

His wary kindness makes her bold. It makes her curious. At first, she is tempted to think he is not as dark as the stories make him seem, but he is quick to disabuse her of this notion (so quick, so vehement, that she sometimes wonders if he is putting on a show even for her). The blood on the aprons she cleans and the macabre slant to his humor, the puppets that follow her with wooden eyes and the severed hand lying on a trophy table, these remind her of the reason he is known as the Dark One and is spoken of in hushed whispers in dark corridors and over flickering fires.

But he says it is just a cup and he stares at her as if he has never seen anything quite like her, and she forgets to be terrified of him. It is easy to be brave when she is not afraid and hard to be afraid when he has given her no reason to be.

It is in a carriage, chasing down a man desperate enough to steal from Rumplestiltskin, that she first realizes he avoids physical contact. He leans close to her, closer than he has been since that first day when he escorted her from her father’s hall with an arm around her waist, and his breath tickles her cheek (it should smell foul, but it does not).

It is in a forest, staring down at a man fleeing with his wife and unborn child, that she begins to think back on all that he has done and said in her time at his castle. He is kind, but only when he can excuse it (and it had taken her only a day or two to realize that his words are his weapons and his cruelty his armor). He draws near her only when it will intimidate her, and he dances away when she stands up to him (and she thinks that maybe he is more afraid of her than she is of him). He watches her when she smiles, when she laughs, and claps his hands in glee when she reacts with the fear or shock or horror that anyone else would (as if he is testing her). He is a strange one, this Rumplestiltskin so feared by all in the land, but beast or man, he is lonely.

So she hugs him. And maybe that was her first mistake, because it is different than she thought it would be. It is almost intoxicating, to put her arms around a man who sways backward in shock. It is almost comforting, to touch someone again after this past week without any physical contact. It is almost…frightening…to feel how warm he is against the chill of the forest and to realize that he is just the right height for hugs and to belatedly notice that she has kept her hand on his chest after the hug is over.

He does not berate her or make some cutting remark that is funny despite its morbidity. Instead, he manages the hint of a smile (as if he must reach far back in his memories to remember how to even form a smile) and he follows her back to the carriage.

It is strange and not at all what she expected, but then, so is everything else involving the man to whom she traded her future. She begins to think she doesn’t mind nearly as much as she should.

\---

“Careful,” he tells her in a sing-song voice. “If you ruin dessert, there might be a nasty surprise waiting for you when you try to sleep.”

“You didn’t even have dessert at all before I came,” she chides him with a smile. “And if you would stop sneaking up on me when I’m carrying dessert to the table, you wouldn’t have to worry about losing it.”

He narrows his eyes at her, twists his mouth in an expression that would make her laugh if she weren’t trying to keep him from realizing just how much she enjoys his presence, and wags his finger at her. “Bossy caretakers can be replaced, you know. There are plenty of kingdoms with troubles large enough to consider trading away their princesses.”

She knows he is teasing (she has learned his signs, his signals, his habits, and if he were truly angry, there would be shouting and pacing and broad gestures big enough to crowd an entire hall and purple smoke to engulf something she cares about and distract her from his unbalanced state), but she still pauses, tries to imagine the Dark Castle with someone else there, a third person to help dust and clean and bring tea to Rumplestiltskin.

It is not a pleasant image.

She likes things as they are. They have their own balance—he works in his tower or goes out on his deals while she cleans and cooks, and he spins while she reads, and in the in between moments, she can sometimes pull him into conversation and he will occasionally keep her company in the garden he now lets her stroll through on nice days. A third person would ruin all of it and make him irritable, make him withdraw once more behind his showy façade and disguising gestures. A third person would not understand why she laughs at him and dares to pour herself a cup of tea after serving him his and sits closer and closer to him when she reads.

No, she likes it the way it is, and she is glad that he is not serious about his threat.

“Yes,” she tells him, “but none of those princesses know how you take your tea.”

And she sets the platter of pie in his hands, her own brushing over his as if to make sure he has a good grip on the warm plate.

He is silent an instant, motionless, standing where she left him as she turns to pull out his chair at the table for him (he is always still after she touches him). 

But when she turns back to him, he is moving again, flourishing with the plate in his hands (somehow not even coming close to dumping the pie, and she finds herself yet again admiring his grace). “Easily remedied,” he remarks, his voice sliding into the upper registers as the platter floats from his hand to alight on the table.

“Really?” Belle asks skeptically (because he is still not used to her presence after a month and he likes his solitude).

“Magic can fix the problems of the empty-headed,” Rumplestiltskin tells her in a lecturing tone, but then he softens, quiets (something Belle still can’t explain, but she loves when it happens), and there is an extra plate (for her) beside his when she reaches out to serve him a piece of the pie. “But,” he adds, “if I got a new caretaker, there’d be one less room down in the dungeons for me to use, and then I might have to curtail my activities.”

Belle knows it is wrong (she remembers the blood on the thief’s chest as he hung from chains), but she laughs anyway (because she has seen Rumplestiltskin conjure up extra rooms with only the wave of his expressive hands). “Definitely unacceptable,” she teases him, and she lets her fingers touch his again as she hands him his plate of dessert.

He stares (he always does), but Belle smiles at him, and eventually, he smiles back.

“One caretaker is enough,” he agrees, and he takes a bite of her pie and grins as if he knows a secret she doesn’t.

She grins, too, because he is _her_ secret.

\---

It is the incident with the curtains and the ladder and his arms that starts her experiments. He’d been there so fast, ready to catch her, but it was the startlement, the incredulity, the struck discovery written across his face (not a mask or an affectation) that really stays with her even weeks after the curtains are all opened. She remembers the soft drift of his hair against her wrist, the feel of his chest rising and falling against her, the strength of his arms supporting her—but most of all, she remembers how he stared at her (like he always does when they touch, but different, _new_ ), how he was frozen as if he couldn’t remember how to move, and then how suddenly, how awkwardly, he dropped her to her feet.

She remembers the feeling of disappointment when he let her go.

So she begins to experiment. She reaches out to touch his hand when they talk at night. She pats his shoulder when she passes him at his wheel, when she tells him good night. She brushes off the lapels of his coat when he tells her he’s leaving the castle. Quick, light touches, companionable and friendly, more and more of them as the days pass, but suddenly they no longer seem like enough.

He flinches away, at first, startled and wary, as nervous and jumpy as the beast she once thought him to be. As the days pass, as she keeps touching him, she feels his eyes on her, always, ready to back away, to disappear in a flurry, to find an excuse to leave should she grow too close to him. Just when she begins to think that she is only scaring him and that she should stop, leave him be (ignore her own rising disappointment), he stops flinching.

She touches his hand, and he tilts his head in that way of his and peers up at her. And the corners of his mouth turn up, just the slightest bit.

She pats his shoulder, and his head turns in her direction, his eyes fluttered half shut.

She brushes off his coat, and he leans, ever so minutely, into the touch.

It’s been months since she last thought him a beast, but it’s impossible to deny his resemblance to a half-wild creature, drawn to affection, starving for touch yet wary of being hurt. She imagines herself luring him in ever deeper and closer with tiny scraps, breadcrumbs to lead him from his isolation.

Strangely, it is not a comparison she likes.

He is so used to hatred, to fear, and she knows he expects betrayal (expects it so much that he kept her in a dungeon for the first couple weeks of her stay, and watched her closely after the news that her family and friends were safe from the ogres lest she try to flee), and if she touches him only to make him susceptible to her, to _train_ him, then she will be doing to him what others have done. She will be betraying him, and her breadcrumbs of affection will lead him to a trap that will ensnare him in kindness that might destroy him.

But when she stops touching him, when she clenches her hands into fists and stays on the far side of the room and doesn’t brush past him, she feels like she’s about to come apart. She feels cut off and bereft, listless and sluggish.

And Rumplestiltskin goes quiet. Still. There are no more jokes to make her laugh, funny expressions to make her giggle, wagging fingers in her face to make her roll her eyes, quiet confessions to make her catch her breath. Instead, he hunches in on himself and he avoids her, sits at his wheel without once turning to look at her, and his voice goes flat and emotionless (or as emotionless as Rumplestiltskin’s voice can ever be), and when he does watch her, it is with such a lost, bewildered expression that Belle feels her heart writhe inside her chest.

“Rumplestiltskin,” she says one day, and she hadn’t even realized, but she’d stopped using his name when she stopped touching him, so he jumps at the sound of it.

“Yes, dearie?” he asks. His hands are busy on his wheel, but she has watched him spin for countless hours and she can easily tell there’s no gold thread emerging from the haphazard revolutions of the wheel. 

She does not like him calling her ‘dearie,’ and she bites her lip in indecision before reminding herself that once, she had wanted to be brave.

“I was wondering,” she says slowly, “if you would help me.”

“With what?” There is sudden suspicion tightening his voice, and any moment he will burst into manic life, prowling toward her, an intense gleam in his eyes, and she will be nothing more than another one of the endless multitudes of people who come to him for their own purposes.

“A book,” she says hurriedly, before he can turn on her. “It’s on the very top shelf of the library and I can’t reach it.”

And it’s true, too. She has wanted to read that one tall book with the illustrations curving around the spine evident even from the floor. But more than she wants to read this book, she wants to erase the hurt at the edges of Rumplestiltskin’s eyes (wants to quiet the itching crackle in her fingertips).

“Afraid you’ll fall and no one will be there to catch you?” he asks with a slight giggle, finally turning to look at her.

She smiles to hear it, to see his eyes, to reassure the note of cautious hope in his higher tone. “Something like that. Will you get it for me?”

He stands (close, so close that Belle feels small and slight and out of breath before him), throws up a hand in the air with his other hand pointed to his elbow. “And what do _I_ get for this chivalrous deed?”

“It’s not chivalry if you expect something in return,” she replies, knowing he will like this answer for the wordplay (his favorite pastime besides spinning).

Rumplestiltskin lets out his high-pitched laugh, but his voice is lower, almost human, when he says, “No wonder chivalry is dying!”

But he leads her to the library with his usual quick strides and he magics the book she points out into her hands. And he watches her, wary once more.

Belle smiles down at the book, flips through it to see the beautiful illustrations and the flowing language she taught herself before being betrothed to Gaston, and then she sets it on the table and steps very close to Rumplestiltskin, and she hugs him. “Thank you, Rumplestiltskin,” she murmurs with her head on his shoulder. (Once, this had been easy and natural, but now it is perilous and frightening.)

He goes stiff, just like last time. He sways away from her, just as he did before. But this time, she holds the embrace for just a second longer, and this time, she feels his hand flutter up against her waist, her shoulder blade, his fingers dancing along her spine before he finally settles it, tentatively, at the small of her back. Her heart thrums wildly against her ribs, but she feels safe and secure, and maybe she is as much of a wild animal being lured into warmth and kindness as he is.

When she pulls back, the bewilderment is still there but the hurt is gone.

That is the end of her experiments, but it is certainly not the last time she touches him.

\---

She kissed him, and for a moment, it was perfect, and then it was not. It was beautiful and bold and she thought it was the right thing, but when he brings her a tray, to the cell where he’s consigned her, with his chipped cup and hot water steeped just as she likes it, she cannot reach out across the divide separating them no matter how she wants to. He is cold and closed off and she is frightened and hurt and maybe even angry, and touching him seems more impossible than taking the kiss back.

When he tells her to leave, she wants to cry. When he tells her he doesn’t care for her, she wants to laugh in his face. When he says nothing, when he keeps his hands so carefully clasped in front of him (a wall to make sure she does not come too close), she wants to shake him and shout at him that they were so close to having everything and now they will have nothing and that cannot be what he wants.

But he tells her to go, and as brave as she has been in the past (as brave as she tries to make herself be), she cannot bring herself to touch his hand, to caress his face, to pat his shoulder, to touch him at all.

She stands there, and a pace away, he stands there, and they are separate, broken individuals. It used to be _them_ and _us_ , but now it is _him_ and _her_ and there is no going back.

So he doesn’t call her back. And she doesn’t touch him (hug him goodbye, to hold them both until they can be reunited again).

Later, she will regret that more than anything.

\---

There is no touch in the cell. The Queen comes in occasionally, asks her questions, taunts her, sneers at Rumplestiltskin. The one-handed man came and he did touch her, his hand brushing against her calves and her wrists as he undid her shackles. His fist left a mark on her cheek that throbbed when she pressed against it (she doesn’t know how long it lasted because there are no mirrors in this large, circular room that mocks the library tower Rumplestiltskin gave her as her own).

The days are long, the nights longer. The moon shines through the window in the ceiling and sometimes it caresses her with silver frost as she sleeps. The sun cannot reach past the grasping spires of the castle to touch her heart and thaw the ice.

She tries to remember everything about Rumplestiltskin that she can, her hand over her mouth to make sure she doesn’t utter any of it aloud where Regina or the pirate can overhear it and use it against her Dark One. 

She remembers his eyes the most, giving the lie to his words, underscoring the intensity of his gestures, showing her the truths he cannot voice. She remembers the kindnesses he showed her, as if he weren’t used to having to prove himself evil and was out of practice. She remembers the hypnotic spin of his wheel, the shimmer of the gold he produces, the stiffness of his back and the curtness of his denial when she’d mentioned maybe learning to spin gold one day. She remembers the books he gave her, the extra ones that had showed up without comment or presentation, in places only she would notice them. 

But she cannot remember what his hands feel like. The blankets are coarser than his hands could ever be (but his hands do have worn callouses). The blue gown she wears is softer (but the backs of his hands are smoother). The walls are too slick (but his long, black nails possess a sheen of their own). The chill of the moon is far too cold (his hands are always warm, heated and solid).

She cannot remember, and that more than the slop passing for food and the Queen’s oppressive visits and the pirate’s bruise on her cheekbone makes her break down and curl up and weep for hours (for days, maybe, or months; it’s impossible to tell).

She thought it was him who longed for touch and craved it enough to lean into every opportunity to enjoy it, but now she realizes that it is _her_ who has grown used to it, addicted to it, who _needs_ it.

“Rumplestiltskin,” she whispers, but there is no answering high-pitched “Yes, dearie?” or husky “Belle.” There is no tilted head and large eyes and long fingers weaving pictures in tandem with his words.

Only her.

\---

He wraps his fingers around her shoulder (this Mr. Gold who’s supposed to protect her, who stares at her as if she’s a ghost come back to taunt him with what he cannot have), and she stares down at his hand on her. She is wearing the coat her rescuer handed her, and the hospital gown beneath that, but she swears she can feel the heat of his palm against her arm. There is a tingling all along her skin, a restless stirring in her heart, a fluttering in the pit of her stomach—and it doesn’t make sense, but neither does anything else.

When he hugs her, she feels the oddest sense of déjà vu. She wonders if she knew him, before whatever happened to see her condemned to that basement. She wonders if he hugged her often and long and if that is why she felt so empty and alone when she curled up on the ledge of her cell. She wonders if she should be frightened of the tight, clutching hold he has on her, as if he wants to pull her straight into himself and never let her go again.

But he does let her go, and there are tears in large, expressive eyes, and his long fingers are still holding onto her shoulder, and she is _not_ afraid.

She’s been afraid so long that it seems odd not to be afraid at all. Odd and exciting, so she accompanies Mr. Gold into the woods and follows him up a faded path even when her legs grow shaky with exhaustion and her lungs burn with the clean, sharp air.

Then she stops in mid-step and she closes her eyes and she remembers who she is.

She remembers who he is.

She remembers what it feels like to be touched by him.

“Wait. Rumplestiltskin, wait,” she calls out.

And he does.

He turns, and he is all man now, all pale skin and worried creases and silver in his hair and a cane in his hand, a limp to his step—but those are his eyes. Large and worried and incredulous and scared (always so very scared, and she wishes she knew who put that fear in him) and just that little hint of hope he can never quite extinguish.

“I remember,” she tells him, but he only looks more afraid, as afraid as he looked the first time she hugged him, as hurt as he looked when she stopped touching him. “I love you,” she says, because she did not say it during all those long evenings spent at his side reading to the accompaniment of his spinning. She did not say it when she kissed him or when he shook her or when they stood on opposite sides of a cell and watched each other leave behind what could have been. She didn’t say it during all those long, cold days and nights in the Queen’s cell, afraid that saying it would give Regina something to use against Rumplestiltskin. She did not know to say it in this concrete cell, locked away so securely that even her name was denied her.

So she says it now, because she has waited long enough and because she does not like it when he looks so scared and because there is nothing else to say. They are the only words that matter.

And then a miracle happens: _he_ hugs _her_. He opens his arms and she steps forward, and he wraps his arm around her and curls inward until she is surrounded on all sides by _Rumplestiltskin._ In all their months together, no matter how many times she touched him, no matter how much he leaned into her caresses, he never once reached out for _her_. But he hugs her, and there are tears in his voice when he speaks.

“Yes,” he says, and Belle is boneless with relief, giddy with delight (she hoped he would believe her, but she did not expect it). “Yes,” he says again. “And I love you, too.”

She knew he did, but she is surprised to hear him say it. Surprised and euphoric and overjoyed and relieved, and so much more that she can’t figure out right now because he is still hugging her and he cradles her cheek in his hand (and yes, how could she have forgotten this? _This_ is what he feels like), and he is staring at her with a look he has never shown her before, something so astonishing and exhilarating that she cannot breathe, cannot move lest she wake herself and find the moon staring down at her from that circular window in the ceiling of the Queen’s cell.

He is Rumplestiltskin, though, so there is an interruption and a delay and excuses and magic pouring outward to engulf the world. But he is _her_ Rumplestiltskin, so he turns to her and he calls her _sweetheart_ and _my darling Belle_ rather than ‘dearie,’ and he has his hand on her arm, on her hand, on her back, on her cheek (as if he has only just realized that he does not have to wait for _her_ to initiate the touch). He is the Dark One, so there are questions and rage and vengeance in dark eyes and fury in the crimped lines of his mouth. But he is _her_ Dark One, so his eyes (so human, so _him_ ) shimmer with tears and the lines around his mouth ease into an awed smile and he chooses _her._

And then he kisses her, and Belle realizes that every single touch she ever gave him, every touch he has granted her, has been leading up to _this._

But it is the hug, afterward, the feel of his shoulder beneath her cheek (the fabric of his clothes different, his scent changed, his skin altered, but still the form and shape she remembers from the Sherwood Forest), that convinces her she is finally, _finally_ home, where she belongs.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

\---

It’s overwhelming, the freedom to touch whenever she wants, as much as she wants. She has to be careful, has to ration the ways she will touch him because if she doesn’t, she begins to lose herself and he forgets to speak and how to move. After all her time locked away (so much more time than she thought, but that’s something else that overwhelms her if she thinks on it so she doesn’t), she is not accustomed to physical contact anymore. After centuries of being alone, Rumplestiltskin isn’t used to it either.

At first, it’s addictive. He leads her back to town with his arm around her, her hand laced in his. She finds reasons to hold his hand or touch his shoulder, his chest, his elbow, as he gives her new clothing. Then there is an interruption and a broken promise and a betrayal that stings so sharply and strikes so deeply and for a few terrible hours, she wonders if she is wrong to love him. Wrong to think there is anything more to him than what everyone else sees.

But he is right—she has been with him for only an hour and he has been without her for decades. It took weeks, months, for him to grow accustomed to seeing her in his castle, to grow comfortable with setting aside the flashy showmanship and being quiet and _himself_ with her. It took her days, weeks, to realize that she could be his friend (more, too, but that was later) without condoning everything he did. Does.

So she goes back, and she almost cries when she sees him sitting at his spinning wheel with that same expression of hurt bewilderment. But there is more there this time—something very like bitter resignation, something like unfamiliar nobility as he tries to let her go—and it is wool he holds in his hand, not straw or gold.

When she puts her hands on his shoulders, she knows she is right. She knows he is more, and if she can ever show him that, shining back at him from the reflection of her eyes since he does not like mirrors, then he will see it, too, and eventually so will everyone else. 

They do not kiss again, not then. They hug, and that is better, because their kiss was ecstasy and bliss and sheer pleasure, but she is tired and he is confused. A hug is familiar and reassuring, soft and welcoming, everything they both need then.

In fact, they hug quite a bit. It makes her want more, but it reminds her of all she has after so long a time of _not having_ , and it is often he who initiates them, so she is happy. For a while.

He sleeps beside her. They each bear their own nightmares, and a hug in the darkness, a solid warmth in the cold night…these remind her that she is no longer locked up. That she is herself again and with him and free. She likes to fall asleep with her head on his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her, and she thinks he likes it too because he always settles himself near her and kisses her hair when she curls into him.

But he has been alone a very long time and she is new to this intimacy, so when she is half-asleep, when he begins to stir, restless and anxious, she rolls away from him, and they sleep side by side, a narrow place between them.

Touch is precious, but sometimes precious things are best when taken (and given) in moderation.

\---

Their separation changes things for a while. He lied (and he has never lied before, preferring instead to brandish his darkness like a torch against the cold), so she left. He tried (and he is not used to trying, preferring instead to crouch in his isolation and hold his hurts and his loneliness close to himself), so she would have come back. But then her father lies, too, and he is more of a monster than she thought, and Rumplestiltskin is more of a man than anyone else thinks, and there is danger and an adventure she never wanted, so she needs time. She needs space. She needs solitude, because as much as she has pretended otherwise, her years in chains and cells have marked her.

Besides, her father would have made her forget Rumplestiltskin, and the look on Rumplestiltskin’s face when he parted her chain with the slice of his hand, when he asked her if she remembered him, is enough to convince her that such would have destroyed him. She wanted time to think, and they would have used her as a weapon against him. After all her years spent being silent, defiant in the face of the Queen’s questions, Belle refuses to be a tool used in Rumplestiltskin’s downfall.

But then…he gives her another library. He tells her the truth. 

He reaches out, and he touches her.

And maybe she will be his weakness, but he is hers, so maybe it’s fair after all, and maybe she won’t inadvertently betray him and make him look afraid and resigned for someone else centuries after she is gone.

He’s walking away, and it’s the dungeon in his castle all over again (only, she’s the one sending him away as if she doesn’t care and he was brave enough to reach across this divide to caress her face), but this time can be different.

So she calls him back.

His tears convince her she did the right thing. Her own tears remind her to be careful.

\---

“This is the only world without magic I could find,” Rumplestiltskin tells her, his voice hushed and very unlike the dealer’s voice he used so often in their old world (as low and husky as it was during the quiet evenings when he’d let slip a bit more about himself while she read). “There are many ways to travel between worlds, but very few that could bring us to a world completely devoid of magic.”

“So Baelfire is here?” she asks. They are alone in his shop, sipping tea from a silver tea set she remembers dusting in his castle, a set they never used because he preferred her chipped cup. Alone and tucked away in the back, but still, she is careful to keep her own voice hushed (careful not to betray his secrets).

His mouth tightens, but his hand does not shake as he takes a sip of his own tea. “Yes. But it hardly matters if I cannot find a way across the town line.”

“You will,” she assures him, and she places her hand over his.

His eyes smile even if his mouth does not. “Yes,” he says, looking down at her hand. “I will.”

Belle smiles back at him, refusing to take her hand away from his (she misses being able to touch him whenever she wishes). “Do you think he will like me?”

“I think he will love you,” he replies, and Rumplestiltskin does not lie.

\---

They have hamburgers, but they are interrupted, and for a while, he is so busy she does not see him. She knows he is helping David and the small boy (and Regina, but she does not let herself think on that for long), so she pretends she does not mind. She checks that his dagger is safe in its hiding place (only once, not compulsively as she wishes, because she cannot draw attention to it) and delves into the task of cleaning up the library and readying it to open. This world has fascinating traditions, including the novel idea of opening up libraries for anyone—even the smallest child or the poorest man or the noblest woman—to borrow books and return them for someone else to enjoy. Belle is looking forward to opening this library to the town of Storybrooke and seeing everyone enjoy the gift Rumplestiltskin gave her.

When he walks in through the doors she left unlocked, late one evening, she knows he has done something bad. He is leaning heavily on his cane, and he does not meet her gaze. Instead, he looks all around at the books and the shelves and the stack of interesting novels she’s set aside for herself and the bucket of water she’s been mopping the floor with (pretending she is not there simply to make certain no one comes for his dagger). He is afraid, and she is suddenly very tired of the fear he carries with him everywhere.

It is dark out and she is cleaning and he does not speak immediately as he studies her library, so it feels almost as if they are still at the Dark Castle. Belle looks down at the rag in her hand and the tile she’s scrubbing, and she remains quiet (just as she had when he would seek her out in their old home).

“We don’t have to worry about Cora anymore,” he finally says. 

Her shoulders tense at the exhausted tone of his voice, but she keeps her silence (sometimes, she thinks he only needs to hear himself, to _say_ the words aloud, and she knows, now, that she is the only one who will listen).

Rumplestiltskin looks down at his hands, on his cane, one atop the other. “I think Sheriff Nolan might be quite unhappy with me for a while, him and his family.”

“So they’re safe then?” she asks, softly, watching him from the corner of her eye. “Snow White and her daughter are back?”

“Yes,” he says, and nothing else.

After a few moments of this, Belle sets the rag in the bucket of lukewarm water and stands to her feet. “Rumple,” she says.

He takes a deep breath and meets her gaze (as if it is a feat worthy of a knight).

“Are you all right?” she asks him. Her hands are wet, damp against her skirts, and so she rubs them against the fabric until they are dry, but she does not let him look away.

“Me?” he asks, confused. “Of course.”

“Is everyone else all right?” she presses, takes a tiny step nearer him. “Is everyone unharmed?”

“Regina will be tired and sore for a while,” he tells her, a savage gleam of satisfaction sparking in his eyes before he blinks it away.

“And you’re not hurt? We’re safe?”

“Yes,” he assures her, fierce and reassuring all at once. “No one will be able to hurt you.”

(No one will be able to use her to strike him a mortal wound, she thinks to herself.)

Belle lets out her breath in a long sigh of relief. “Good,” she proclaims. And then she takes three steps forward very quickly and rushes into his arms (opened hastily to receive her). She holds him tightly to herself, lays her cheek against his shoulder, breathes in his now-familiar scent, and lets all the worry she hadn’t admitted she’d been feeling (the fear that made her scrub until her muscles ached and made her frustrated to see answering fear in Rumplestiltskin) drain out of her, seeping away, banished at his touch as if by magic.

“I missed you,” she whispers.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, kisses her hair and her brow and her cheek (his voice choked with the weight of more days—years—than her own words carry). “I missed you, too.”

Sometimes, she realizes, words can touch a soul more deeply than even a hug.

\---

She kissed him in the castle. He kissed her by the well. They both moved at the same time to kiss later, when she stayed with him in his house and slept at his side every night (lulled to sleep by the sound of his breathing and the feel of his hand stroking her hair). But they haven’t kissed since he lied to her by omission and she left without telling him. They’ve held hands and he’s stroked her cheek and she’s tucked her hand against his elbow, and they’ve hugged as often as she can find excuse to, but no more.

And Belle wants more.

Only…she’s not quite sure how to go about it.

There are very few moments when they can be alone and quiet. The diner means Ruby and Granny always near, ready to protect Belle from the Dark One no matter how many times she tells them she is happy with him. The streets are even more questionable, filled with people who stare askance at Rumplestiltskin smiling and holding hands with a woman, and no matter how hard she smiles or how fiercely she holds onto his hand, Rumplestiltskin grows tense and quiet and wary under their disapproving stares (or he grows angry and defiant, and that is dangerous, too).

Eventually, after a few weeks of this, Belle grows tired of it and she packs a picnic basket and takes it to his shop. He smiles when she comes through the door (smiles so wide, so bright, so _real_ ), and he watches her approach him as if she is a dream he is willing to give himself over to entirely. So she sets down the picnic basket and levers herself up on the counter between them to brush a kiss over his cheek (her heart flutters at the feel of his clean-shaven jaw, the tickle of his hair, the catch to his breath). When she settles back to her feet, she grins up at him.

“I brought lunch,” she announces (because he needs the simplest things spelled out sometimes). She begins to unpack the basket, and he stares at each item of food she retrieves as if it is more mystical than the magical artifacts crowding his shop all around them.

She is happy (elated and hopeful) and he is finally smiling openly, so of course they are interrupted. What is worse is that these people, barging in to accuse him of a murder she _knows_ he would never commit (he’s the one who introduced her to Dr. Hopper, who told her the gentle-mannered man could help her if she still has nightmares of her cells), don’t even seem to realize that they have interrupted anything. David knows her and manages a tiny nod, but the other two (Snow White and Emma, Belle assumes) hardly give her more than a glance, and they do not listen when Rumplestiltskin speaks (as if they don’t realize that he tells the truth if only you are wise enough to listen both to what is said and what is not).

It isn’t enough, to stand by Rumplestiltskin’s side and speak in his defense (because no one else will), but it makes him catch his breath, makes his eyes smile even if his mouth does not (even if he does not quite look at her while playing his game with these others). It isn’t enough, but it is something, and he treats each _something_ she gives him, no matter how small, as if it is more than he has ever been given before.

In return for the picnic she brought him, he reveals another piece of himself. She laughs to see him cooing over a dog, and he tells her even without being asked that he once kept sheepdogs (a treasure of a memory of the man he keeps uncovering just for her). Belle’s heart fills to overflowing, so much so that she wonders if it is possible for a heart to break from sheer happiness.

So when the others are gone, taking their accusations and their demands and their magic with them (off to hunt down Regina, and Belle cannot bring herself to care too much about that), she steps up very close to Rumplestiltskin and lets her hand trail down his tie.

“Belle?” he asks, but there is hope igniting like fireworks in his eyes.

“I love you,” she whispers. She feels as if she’s falling (it’s the first time she’s said it since walking to a well), as if there isn’t enough air in this shop (the Dark Castle compressed into one tiny building), as if his eyes could swallow her up (and maybe they can).

“My darling Belle,” he breathes, his clever fingers trickling like water down her cheeks. “I love you, too.”

She smiles, bites her lip, and then decides she does not care to wait any longer, and she slides her arms around his neck and goes on her tiptoes and kisses him.

When he kisses her back, she wonders why she waited so long.

When he leans his brow against hers and closes his eyes, soaking in the moment, she does not think she will wait so long again.

\---

They are happy, for a while, so very happy that Belle thinks maybe she will finally be able to chase away the fear that shadows him so often (maybe he will finally be able to convince her this will not all disappear into the shadows of her cell). He calls her on the phone he gave her and he looks at the changes she makes in the library and he begins to smile back at her without hesitation, without tears in his eyes (without thinking she will never smile at him again). She visits him in his shop and helps him find a new place for their chipped cup and she no longer pauses before reaching up to leave a kiss on his cheek, the corner of his mouth, his lips (no longer blushes when she thinks of kissing him more deeply, longer, in more private places than the library or the shop).

There is sadness, too, of course, because this is real life and not one of her storybooks. When she is invited to Archie’s funeral, she isn’t sure she should go. She hardly knew the man, kind as he was, but when she asks Rumplestiltskin, he tells her to go.

“Let them know you for _you_ ,” he tells her, a flick of his fingers gesturing to the whole of the town. “Better for them to think of you as a friend than as the companion of the Dark One.”

“They can think of me as both,” she retorts, and hugs him because she can (because he wants her to).

But she is scared. Rumplestiltskin thinks her courageous, calls her his brave and beautiful Belle, but she is afraid of the funeral, with graves and tears and so much anguish in the people around her she barely knows. She will go, and she will try to give what comfort she can, but they are new people who have already formed their own opinions of her, and if she is to be brave, she needs something to be brave _for_.

So she invites Rumplestiltskin up to the small, comfortable apartment he gave her (and she has never paid for it, with anything, and he has never asked for it). “For dinner,” she says, “because I want to see you,” so he comes because he doesn’t like to deny her anything. Sometimes, when she finds him in the backroom of his shop or in the basement of his house, he has magic in his eyes and his hands tremble with power, but he always opens the door to her or invites her in or agrees to go out with her. And maybe he had plans for tonight (plans and hopes and obsessions all revolving around _Baelfire_ ), but he only smiles and weaves his fingers through the hand she offers him and follows her up the narrow steps to her apartment.

They eat, and he teases her until she can’t take a drink or another bite lest she choke on her laughter, and his eyes sparkle and gleam with thoughts and desires he no longer bothers to hide from her (and this trust is as precious as the tidbits of his son he entrusts to her). Eventually, they move from the dining table to the couch, his cane set aside, her hair spilling loose around her shoulders.

It is dark outside, moonlight spills past the light curtains to froth along the carpeted floor, and the light from the kitchen leaves the living room illuminated in a private, golden bubble. Belle feels, then, as if this is all there is. No Storybrooke, no funeral to attend in a few days, no scared and desperate people to accuse or stare or judge. No father to look at her as if she is already dead. Just her and Rumplestiltskin, alone in the world and world enough for the two of them.

She pulls her legs up and leans against Rumplestiltskin, and the closeness of her apartment (so strange and different from the tall shelves and vast expanse of space and maze of books that was her room in the Dark Castle) feels like home when he curls his arm around her and tips his head to rest against hers.

He’s been so good lately, been trying so hard to be honest, to tell her the things he wants to keep secret and safe, to include her in the life that for longer than she can comprehend has included only one (Baelfire, not Rumplestiltskin, because she does not think he realizes there can be a Rumplestiltskin without Baelfire). He’s been honest and forthcoming, but as she holds the flickering fear of what will come in two days hidden inside her, she realizes that _she_ hasn’t been entirely open with him.

It’s hard, harder than she thought (and no wonder he has to work to reveal his fragile vulnerabilities), but she opens her mouth and she begins to talk, in quiet, hushed whispers, of her fear of everyone else, rushing in to maybe rend and destroy the world she has created (with just the two of them) for her and Rumplestiltskin. She admits that she is furious with her father but that she misses him. She confides in her True Love, uncovering her secrets and her nightmares and giving them over to him. Everyone else seeks to hide any weaknesses from the Dark One lest he take advantage of them, but of this, Belle is not afraid. She knows he will take her secrets and he will put them next to his own, and they will be safe there, guarded from anything and everything for all of eternity.

When her words finally run out, when her silent tears have trickled down her cheeks in the soft glow and patient darkness, she gradually realizes she is curled up on her side, Rumplestiltskin lying behind her (on his good leg), tucked between her and the back of the couch, his arm wrapped so tightly around her waist that she knows he would never let her fall. His breath is soft against her neck, warm and wispy, and when he shifts his chin to smooth her hair down away from his mouth, she lets her eyes flutter closed. This is a moment she can memorize, a memory she can keep with her forever should she ever find herself in a cell again. He is all around her, his touch all over her, and every rise and fall of his chest behind her is a miracle.

Sometimes, it’s hard to believe she isn’t dreaming this all up (curled on her bed in Regina’s cell while the moon adorns her skin with frost), imagining that she is free and lying beside a Rumplestiltskin who freely admits he loves her.

But this _is_ real. She couldn’t make up the feel of him, the realness of him behind her, the length of his arm curved around her just so, and the details of his fingers as she plays them through her own.

He’s here and he’s real and he loves her.

Belle smiles, her tears forgotten, secrets once more put away, her heart full and fluttering. She makes to move away, to give him space, careful not to stifle him, but his arm tightens and he nudges his chin down on her shoulder, and so she subsides.

“I’m here,” he whispers, and maybe he thinks she is still raw from the confessions she poured out before him and wants to reassure her, but she doesn’t care (she isn’t raw or worried or upset at all). Because he’s here and that’s what matters.

“I’m here, too,” she replies, and she laces her fingers through his and leans her head back against him.

In the morning, when she wakes, he’s still there, and she has never felt so warm and loved (so touched) before in her whole life.

She promised him her forever, so long ago, and she thinks that for the first time, someone actually managed to get the better end of a deal with Rumplestiltskin.

She’s very glad that it was her.

\---

He is absent the next day, but she is busy with Ruby and Leroy and a few others, all talking to her in whispers and dancing around the subject of Archie and what he meant to them. Belle gives what comfort she can, and she tells them of the compassion she’d noticed in Dr. Hopper the few times they spoke, and she convinces herself she does not notice (or mind) when she spends the next night alone and faces the morning’s funeral on her own.

When Rumplestiltskin calls her from the funeral and greets her with secretive triumph and fierce pride as she enters his shop, she spares a moment to wonder if (to hope that) it was her beside him, her trust and her faith in him and her warmth next to him that night, that made him finally realize whatever it was he was missing. But even if it was not, even if he discovered this entirely on his own, she is happy for him. Finally, he will find his son and banish some few of the nightmares that plague him. (Finally he will look at her and he will see himself as a man, a father, not a monster with a goal, and she will be a woman who loves him.)

Baelfire consumes his thoughts, and it’s right, it’s natural, it’s proof of the love she knows he possesses within him, so she hates that it is she who distracts him. An attack in her library, and Rumplestiltskin comes immediately to protect her (“I’m here now,” he tells her, and she thrills at this reminder of their night spent sleeping side by side, connected so closely, so magically). A walk down the street, and he confides in her (“I took his hand,” he says, and she has to take his because here, at last, is part of the reason he still looks at her as if he cannot believe that she could love him). An argument in the remnants of his shop and the happiness they’ve been gifted with is disintegrating all around them (“This is my fault,” she admits to him, and as angry, as scared, as determined as she is, she cannot help but relax a bit at his answering look of complete incomprehension). 

“Promise me,” she asks him, and maybe it is wrong of her to try to force such a concession from him, but she saw it more as a safeguard. He lost the shawl because of her, through her (she has become the weapon she tried so hard to avoid becoming), but Rumplestiltskin is a man (not a monster) who makes wrong decisions, and this…this has all the makings of the worst decision (one that will haunt and destroy him).

Rumplestiltskin secretly wants to be a hero, to be a father worthy of his son, to be the prince he thinks she deserves, and this one-handed pirate threatens all of that, in some way she can’t be sure of because she has only pieces of their story. But Belle secretly wants to be a hero, too, and there is nothing better, nothing nobler, than saving Rumplestiltskin’s quest and aiding him in his search for his son. Finding Archie alive (and the funeral she attended that morning, the tears his friends shed, all of it was for nothing, but she has never been more happy to have wasted her time) and rescuing him is a definite bonus, but still she can think only of the shawl that made Rumplestiltskin’s eyes soften and grow wistful and hopeful, some inner light burning there in a way she has sometimes feared only exists in her imagination.

When she thought he was a beast, when she held a cup of water to the lips of a man he tortured, when he was little more than an ambiguous enigma more full of mystery and questions than hope or potential for goodness, she convinced him not to kill a man (because the woman was pregnant and all he could see was Bae, she realized later). Now, standing on the deck of a ship where he once stood as a powerless man, where he once reached out his hand and tore out the heart of his wife, where he now beats a man with his cane (his crutch, and only now does she begin to think that it is his fear of helplessness, powerlessness, vulnerability that is his true crutch, not magic), she once more does her best to remind him that he is more than evil and darkness and vengeance.

“This is what he wants,” she rationalizes, because Rumplestiltskin does not like being manipulated. “There’s still good in you,” she blurts out, words so similar to what she’d told him in Sherwood Forest, because they worked then and maybe they can again. “Please…please show me I’m not wrong,” she begs him, and finally he meets her eyes, and the Dark One slides away to reveal her Rumplestiltskin staring back at her, remnants of the Dark One tangled up together with the spinner, the father, the lover. 

She pauses, hesitates, breathless, motionless, afraid to move and break the spell and see him give himself over to the Dark One. The pirate is still beneath him, watching, shaken for the first time she’s known him, staring at Rumplestiltskin incredulously.

And Rumplestiltskin reaches out to her. Takes her hand. Curls his fingers around her.

Belle holds on as tightly as she can, pulls him after her, wanting nothing more than to leave this ship forever (this ship that holds too many memories of his wife, of a woman who made him afraid and nervous and resigned to never being loved, a woman he killed with his bare hands), leave the pirate and the blood on the deck and the stench of fear and pain in the hold where Archie was tied up.

Rumplestiltskin’s hand is tight in hers. He’s holding onto her. He’s touching her (his eyes avoiding her as assiduously as he once watched her, so afraid, so ashamed, so full of brimming, bitter darkness he doesn’t want her to see). _He_ reached out for her (he _is_ changing, is growing and evolving and learning and how can she judge him for crimes committed centuries before her birth?).

He’s touching her, and nothing is simple or absolute or clear. It’s all gray and shifting and changing, black and white fading away into shades and hues that reflect back the molten brown of her Dark One’s eyes. He’s a man here, weathered skin and worn creases and calloused hands and mangled ankle, vulnerable eyes and fragile smiles and wispy hair and delicate touches, and he is hers. Broken and twisted and full of shadows, scarred and mangled and a conscience stained with blood—but _hers._

He’s the Dark One. She knows that, knew it the first time she met him, knew it when she gave her life to him. Knew it when she hugged him, trailed her hand over his, dared to caress him, kissed him, pulled him down beside her and slept at his side all night. 

Rumplestiltskin, and some layers are darker than others (like a murdered wife and a world-destroying curse), but so many are more beautiful than anyone would guess (like a quest to find his son and a library given her in every world she’s lived in), and in the end, he is still hers.

She tightens her hand in his and slows her step so she can lean into him.

She pretends not to notice his stumble, or the catch in his breathing, or the tears in his eyes.

\---

“Here we go,” he says, his hand trailing after hers, holding on as long as possible.

Belle wants to weep at that statement alone (“This is my quest, my journey,” he’d told her, still not quite accustomed to having anyone to walk at his side, but now there is a _we,_ and that means more than any number of roses or necklaces ever could), but she must be brave. She must be strong. She will not be a weapon to hurt him, a tool to aid in his downfall, or a heavy chain holding him back. So she will not cry and she will not open her clenched fist and drag him back to her side (to safety). She will stand here and she will watch him step over this dividing line and she will wait for him to return to her (because she knows he will).

There is a moment of utter terror, when he freezes as a magic chill shimmers over him, when he turns and studies their surroundings as if he can’t quite place them (a moment when she wonders how a world without Rumplestiltskin could even be worth living in). And then he points at her, his nimble fingers marking her out as adeptly as he can summon magic, and he smiles his crooked, mischievous smile at her, and he says, “Belle.”

There is a moment, then, of sheer happiness, when she reaches out for his hand (careless of the line painted between them), when he gives it to her as naturally as if he does not need to think about it anymore. She smiles up at him, so relieved, so hopeful, so jubilant for his sake that she almost cannot breathe past the swelling of her heart. He is smiling down at her, his fingers are curled around hers, and nothing in the world can come between them (and she decides, then, that she will not go to her apartment tonight, that instead she will go home with him and lay beside him and hold him, engrave the memory on her mind for all the nights when he is gone, searching for his son).

“Oh, Belle, I so wish you were coming with me!” he exclaims, nothing of artifice or calculation in his eyes or his voice.

“As do I,” she admits. But she is proud of him (for leaving the pirate behind, for being brave, for stepping over the line) and she loves him (for holding her hand and smiling at her and _wishing_ she could accompany him on his adventure), so she says, “But it doesn’t matter.”

He tilts his head, just the slightest bit, and for an instant, he is scaled and restless, confused and entranced by whatever it is in her that confounds him, the Dark Castle protecting them behind its ramparts and spells. “And why not?” he asks her.

_I will never leave you,_ she wants to tell him. _I will be here for you forever. I will love you forever. My heart is yours. Don’t forget me. Don’t leave me behind. I will keep your heart safe. You can trust me. I trust you._

She wants to say much, too much, so much that she is trapped in the space of a moment, the interval of a heartbeat, and his eyes contain the world within them, and his hands cradle her heart. But she has already told him all of those things, in the brush of her fingers against his, in her arms around him, in the play of her lips on his, in the way her steps fall in time with his, in her smile as she looks at him. 

“Because,” she settles for saying (and it’s not enough, but it will do), “you’ll find him, and when you do, I’ll be here waiting for you when you get back.”

He has been abandoned and betrayed, her dear Dark One, and once upon a time, he never would have believed her. He would have suspected treachery, would have demanded a promise and a contract and a signature. But he is more Rumplestiltskin than Dark One now, and he has learned to reach out on his own, to stretch forth his hand and touch _her._ So he smiles at her (and she doesn’t mind the tears gleaming in dark eyes because these are happy tears), and he bends down to kiss her.

There is an instant of expectation, of _waiting,_ of patient contentment. His hand is a warm, solid weight in hers, his smile real and soft and so very gentle, his eyes fluttering closed to hide the magnitude of emotions he has never been able to contain. She is chilled, but more urgently, she feels overheated, flushed, ready and oh so willing to tilt her head back and kiss him.

There is an instant of fear and pain and confusion. Terror erasing the smiles, the happiness, the trust, the future easing the worn shadows in the hollows of his face. Burning, searing pain in her shoulder, stumbling forward, into his arms as he struggles to catch her, to hold her up.

There is a flash of light, a blue shimmering. The sound of a gunshot belatedly echoing in her conscience. A splash of orange at her feet. Hands on her, warm breath against her cheek. Starbursts of pain at her back.

Then there is nothing.

\---


	3. Chapter 3

\---

She is on the road. It’s night, stars almost invisibly pricking the black sky. It’s raining, a shimmer of moisture making the air waver in front of her, a haze that gives the setting an air of unreality. Her shoulder hurts, aches and burns in a way that doesn’t make any sense.

There’s a man holding her, cradling her against him. He’s shouting in her face, his hands jostling her carelessly, eyes wide and fraught with panic she doesn’t understand, and all she hears is _Belle, Belle, Belle_ like an echo, a shadow of a memory of a dream.

“Who—?” she stammers, frightened and upset and so unbelievably confused. “Who’s Belle?”

Blood stains her shoulder, spreading out from a hole in her jacket and shirt (a jacket and shirt she doesn’t remember wearing; where is the hospital gown and the coat her rescuer gave her?), but the man (Mr. Gold, she thinks, but she can’t quite remember if she’d managed to find him on her own or if _he_ found her) stares down at her, shocked and disbelieving and _wounded,_ as if he’s the one who’s been shot. 

There are shouts and another man behind them, a pistol in his hand (the gleam of sharp silver where a hand should be), and she is moved (cradled and sheltered as if she is infinitely precious) and then she cannot look away, cannot think, cannot even move because Mr. Gold ( _he’ll protect you,_ her rescuer had said, but he must have been wrong, or maybe it was only another delusion) is holding a ball of flame in his hand and there is death in his eyes, flickering with reflected fire.

She doesn’t have time to see anything else, to think anything else, to figure out why there is a fireball in a man’s hand or why there is a pirate with a gun, because there’s the screech of tires and the fireball disappears. But the frenzy, the panic, is still there in his eyes as he turns to her. “Belle!” he shouts, and she doesn’t know why he keeps calling her that, but it doesn’t matter. He dives at her, and there is pain and hard surfaces and dirt and mud and the stench of wet asphalt, and for one blessed instant, there is the soothing void of blackness.

It doesn’t last.

She wakes to his whisper, his murmur, and his hands are on her, and she _doesn’t like it._ He’s too much, all over her, everywhere, and she can’t get away from him. His hands are holding onto her arms, her legs, her shoulders (helping her up and brushing away dirt from her jacket and smoothing down her hair) and he’s kneeling in front of her (like he’s begging her, pleading with her, and she doesn’t know what he _wants_ ) and his voice never _stops_ , going on and on, a shifting murmur of words and tones and pleas and empty reassurances in an accent that shifts pitches, but he doesn’t seem to _hear her._

“Shh, shh, beautiful Belle,” he says, and that hurts even worse because he’s touching her and he’s talking to her but he doesn’t know _her_ at all.

She just wants him to be gone. She wants the pain in her shoulder to disappear. She wants the rain and the darkness and the smoking car and the line spray-painted across the black road to all go away, and she never thought she would want to go back to her tiny little room with its grated windows and its hard ledge—but she does. At least the room is familiar and understandable and quiet and real.

She screams (because he’s still touching her with hands like burning brands—but no fire, only his skin and his touch and his _voice_ ), and he waves his hand, and for an instant, she thinks he is going to burn her with fire, cast flames at her from his palm. But instead, the pain in her shoulder vanishes, gone as if it had never been, and there is only a hole where there was once something else.

“All better, good,” he tells her, but he’s lying, because nothing is better or good now. It’s all pain and confusion and loss, and the feel of his hands on her, scorching through the chill of the rain and the flare of the scabs on her knees and palms and the din of sirens approaching.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” he says, but he’s not listening to her and he’s still touching her, and she _is_ afraid. Of him. Of his hands. Of the fire in her blood and the surge of her heart.

He lets her back away from him, but his hand lingers on her knee, her calf. “Belle, please,” he begs, and she can’t take it anymore.

“ _What are you?_ ” she screams at him, and finally, for the first time, she touches him. Affects him. Hurts him.

He backs away. There are people there, rushing toward her, engulfing her in an embrace, helping Mr. Gold to his feet, and he’s saying she doesn’t remember, she crossed a line, she’s gone, but she can’t concentrate on that. There’s a woman with her arm around her shoulders, helping her rise, asking her questions in a soft voice. There’s another woman over by a man broken on the ground, and there’s blood on her jacket still, sticky against her flesh, and there are police cars and sirens and talking, but absolutely none of it matters.

She can only see Mr. Gold. His eyes like empty voids, his hands hanging slack at his sides until the man who helped him gives him a cane, his face closed down so that the flames are gone cold as ash and bitter as poison.

Then he is gone and there are more shouts, and more yelling (“What would Belle want you to do?” but she pretends she doesn’t hear that or notice that silence falls after the question), and for a while, she is alone (abandoned, bereft, heartbroken) and there is only the soft-voiced woman lifting her up and herding her over to a car where the strange man is tugging Mr. Gold away from the broken man and making him lean against a nearby vehicle and…and…and so much more, but it turns into a shifting, swirling mass of people she doesn’t know and words she doesn’t understand and touches that don’t affect her at all.

And then the woman leaves her alone in the cold and the dark, and she huddles into herself and wraps her arms around herself—and cannot look away from Mr. Gold. Standing apart from her. Staring at her. Watching her (but all he sees is _Belle, Belle, Belle_ ), cold and hard and…and _yearning._

She ducks her head and lets her hair hide her from him.

But she still sees him, seared into the backs of her eyelids.

Watching her.

Waiting.

Wanting.

And there is a fire waiting to be ignited in his eyes.

\---

She wakes to his kiss, and if it were a story, she would remember whatever it is he wants her to remember. She would be healed and well and not fractured by a lifetime spent in a tiny little room hidden away from the world (she would be Belle), and she would smile at him (a handsome prince, with light in his eyes and kindness in his touch), and they would be happy (not broken and hurting and alone).

But it isn’t a story, and his touch burned through even her sedated dreams (lethargic and familiar), and so she screams. 

She is afraid that he will summon another fireball. That he will hurt her and scare her and threaten her. She watches his hands (raised in front of him as if it is _she_ who is dangerous), but no fireball appears, no flames or shimmer of blue that leaves her numb and unharmed (and aching with something _missing_ ).

Instead, he backs away (and his eyes hold more terror than even she feels). He apologizes (soft and quiet and anguished). And he runs away from her (all dark lines and black coat and gilded cane).

And he did hurt her. Not with fire. Not with bullets. Not with threats.

But he left. And she hurts.

\---

“It-it’s a cup,” she tells him, because he’s looking at it as if it’s oh so much more (and if empty air can become a fireball, then maybe a cup can become something precious and valuable). “It’s…it’s damaged.”

She wants to believe him. She wants to listen to him and realize that he’s making sense and she’s just been a little out of it and she’ll know exactly who he is and why he’s here and what he wants from her (because her rescuer promised Mr. Gold would protect her, but this Mr. Gold looks at her and only wants her to disappear and cease to exist so that he can have his Belle back). She wants to be someone who can reach out and touch him and not flinch away when he lifts his hand to brush back her hair or hand her a damaged teacup.

But he tells her it’s magic, a talisman, a charm, and it will make her remember, but she already remembers (she was in her cell so long she doesn’t even have to close her eyes to imagine it around her again), and he’s not touching her anymore so she can think clearly now—and if there’s one thing she knows, it’s that she’s never been in a castle and she’s never held this teacup before and she’s not Belle (the woman who makes him almost-cry and almost-smile and almost-hope and always-hurt).

“Just look at it!” he demands, but his hand is on the cup, cradling it, holding it, protecting it, and he doesn’t care about her.

It makes her angry. It makes her sad. It makes her scared.

She’s confused (and they will come and lock her away again and even this tiny bit of freedom will be denied her).

When she throws the cup, when it shatters against the wall, she thinks that maybe it really was magic. Maybe his heart was in the cup. Maybe he’d changed his heart into the cup itself.

And now she’s broken it.

His grief hurts even more than the bullet wound she knows she didn’t imagine. His quiet apology strikes more deeply than her own confusion and pain.

He walks away.

She tells herself she is glad. (She does not look at the broken shards he leaves behind.)

\---

He does not come back. 

A woman comes and says they are friends. She brings her a book and muffins and tears and sad smiles. She does not touch her.

The nurse is here, and the hospital room she has all to herself is little different from the cell. The sedatives run their sluggish, lightning haze through her veins and the days merge one into another. The nurse touches her often, but she cannot feel it past the numb lethargy.

A man comes and tells her about magic. When he says it aloud, when he looks at her with fervent zeal in his eyes, it sounds real. It sounds like more than a delusion (but that only makes Mr. Gold’s words, and the look in his eyes, and the cup she destroyed even more difficult to remember without curling into a ball and weeping). The man tells her he believes her, but then he leaves and he does not come back, and she is alone again.

And still Mr. Gold does not come.

She begins to think that she should not have told him to go away. She begins to think he should not have chosen now to finally start listening to her.

\---

Dr. Whale gives her a phone, one day. It’s her phone, he says. He retrieved it from her bag (the one a tall man with a badge at his belt and pity in his eyes brought her after Mr. Gold left) and he says that Mr. Gold wants to talk to her.

She wants to throw the phone (like she threw the cup) and go back to the sedatives and the book and the absence of any feeling.

But he touched her, once, and it’s been so long since she’s seen him and felt him. So she takes the phone (curled up on her side in the bed, because she is tired and her latest dose hasn’t worn off yet), and she lets Mr. Gold tell her who she is.

“You are a hero,” he tells her (and there aren’t many opportunities to be a hero in a cell, but she hears the conviction in his voice and knows he believes it), “who helped your people.” (And she is alone and has no _people_ , only him.)

“You’re a beautiful woman,” he says (and there were no mirrors in her cell, but she remembers he called her ‘Beautiful Belle’ and he looked at her as if she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen), “who loved an ugly man.” (She remembers him kissing her, backing away, fleeing through a door, and she does not think he spends much time looking in mirrors either.)

“Really, really loved me,” he adds (and he thinks she is Belle, but she thinks it would be easy to love him even if she isn’t Belle).

“You find goodness in others, and when it’s not there, you create it,” he continues (and he’s nowhere near, not even in the same building, but he might as well be right at her side, because his words burn through her as adeptly as did his touch).

“You make me want to go back, back to the best version of me, and that never happened before.” (And it hasn’t happened this time, either, because she’s spent her life sitting on a ledge beneath a window, watching a sliver of the sky pass her by, but she _wants_ to believe him.)

“So when you look in the mirror, and you don’t know who you are…” (And she has looked in the mirror, the tiny rectangle hanging in the bathroom, and wondered who she is.) “ _That’s_ who you are.” (She doesn’t know how he knows her, why he _thinks_ he knows her, but she _wants_ him to be right.)

“Thank you,” he says, and she thinks she hears him say “Belle,” but maybe not, because there is only a dial tone ringing in her ear and the sound of tears sliding down her face.

And maybe he was telling the truth (and maybe he loved her), but it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead.

Even the sedatives cannot make her stop weeping.

Even the numbness cannot erase the echo of his voice.

Even the truth of reality cannot banish the beauty of the fantasies he wove for her.

And maybe her heart was in that chipped cup, too, because it’s broken now.

\---

She is trying to read the book the woman left for her when he knocks at the door to her room. She’s had time to think, since his phone-call (since Dr. Whale found out the nurse was giving her so many sedatives and filled the room with sharp-edged threats), time to piece together her fragmented memories. Time to realize she did not want him to die. She wants him to be alive. To be well. To come back.

And now here he is.

He smiles when he sees her, as if he can’t help himself (and she smiles, too). He hesitates at the doorway, as if he’s afraid of her (and she realizes, to her surprise, that _she_ isn’t afraid). He apologizes for startling her, as if that is more important than whatever made him think he was going to die (and she wonders if he apologizes for fireballs and blue shimmers and kisses as much as for alarming phone-calls).

Her memories of that night, out on the black road with the rain in her face and the sirens piercing her ears and the stench of smoke in the air, are flickering and startling, unbelievable and dark, full of flashes of terror and moments of pain and a great overwhelming, swathing confusion. She remembers a man in shadows, hands that never let her be, a voice that pushed and shoved and demanded feelings and emotions and responses from her, a cane that sounded loud in the stormy air against the road (and the flash of a pirate she hasn’t seen here at the hospital). She remembers a man, black against the white of the hospital, the echoes of his desperate shout (“What’s happening? Belle? Belle!”)

But this man almost seems someone else entirely. He’s still and quiet and careful. He keeps a pace between her hospital bed and his feet, his hands draped very pointedly on the golden head of his cane. He watches her tentatively, cautiously, warily (yearningly, desperately, as if he wants to reach out and touch but doesn’t trust her not to vanish into thin air). His voice is soft and quiet and not demanding at all.

It doesn’t seem right, to smile at him and trust him and believe him and forgive him for the flames at his fingertips and the intimacy of his kiss and the imperiousness of his cup, so she asks him the same question she asks everyone she meets (except the nurse, because there is no use in tempting fate).

She asks him about magic and the healing he could conjure with a wave of his hands (but not the flames he’d summoned with rage and grief and vengeance searing in his eyes). She thinks he will lie and give her the same story everyone else does (even the doctor who made sure she could stay awake through the days), and disappointment flares heavy and cold in her stomach when he begins to mouth the same platitudes. 

“Once you remember who you are,” he says, and she can’t help but stare up at him, because this is not the same script the others have followed, “it’ll all become clear.”

Fear is easy and bravery is hard, but he told her she could be a hero (she could love him), so she does her best to pretend to bravery (to build a bridge between them). “Can you help me do that? Remember who I am?”

“Only if you help me remember who I am,” he replies.

She’s useless, locked away for being dangerous or crazy or flawed, but he looks at her, and he thinks she is precious (like the cup he wanted her to look at). He thinks she is beautiful (like the woman he cared about enough to kiss). He thinks she is good (like someone he could call in his last moments). And now he wants her to help him (like she’s valuable and useful and helpful and _not-broken_ ). 

A chance. A hope. A goal.

She’s been locked away, and as soon as she was freed, she found herself in the cold and dark with a hole in her body. She doesn’t know this Mr. Gold (but “he’ll protect you,” she’d been promised), but he knows her. Somehow, someway she can’t explain (but she can’t explain magic either, and he did not say she was crazy), he’s part of her past, part of _her_. His touch wouldn’t have stayed with her so long if he weren’t.

So she reaches out (because he won’t), to grasp hold of this chance (to test herself; to test him).

Her hand fits just so over his. Her fingers curl over his. Her warmth merges with his.

It feels right (especially when he jerks at her movement). It feels natural (especially when he stares down at their hands as if it’s more amazing than flames and healing). It feels good (especially when he looks back up at her and smiles a reverent, careful smile).

It burns and sears through her, a scorching inferno sweeping across her brittle, hollow nerve endings and making them sing and wake, stir from their slumber to cast colored sparkles across her vision as she looks into his scared, lonely, hopeful eyes.

“We can help each other,” she says, and she knows it is true. 

“Yeah,” he breathes (and she thinks he wants to kiss her). 

“Let’s talk to someone about getting you out of here,” he says (and she thinks she wants to kiss him). “You’ve been locked up long enough.”

She smiles up at him (her hand still on his, because now that she’s started, she doesn’t want to _stop_ ). He stares down at her (his smile still in his eyes, and even if she’s not who he wants her to be, he’s still going to help her). 

She wonders how she ever could have been afraid of this man. Her rescuer. Her healer. 

Her savior.

\---

She has things to pack. They’re unfamiliar to her (all except the phone, which she handles with sentimental care), but she places them in her bag anyway. 

Then a woman comes in, with a smile (open and wide and friendly and not at all like Mr. Gold’s), and she says Mr. Gold’s name. The woman, the mayor, seems…hollow and dark, something broken inside her, but still she is trying to be helpful. So she offers her a smile.

In return, the mayor hands her a tiny object. “What’s this, dear? Did you drop it?” she asks.

She didn’t, but she looks down at the matchbook anyway. Once, and then again.

And everything becomes suddenly clear.

\---

Lacey’s not quite sure how she came to lose her memories, or why she has vague recollections of a cell, but she doesn’t care. She’s been cooped up too many days, been away from her usual haunts so long that everyone will have forgotten her. There’s an echo in her head, something about Mr. Gold, but she shrugs it away and she walks out of the hospital on her own. They can’t stop her after all—she’s fine, healthy, and she has her memory now.

Her apartment, on the rattier side of town, looks abandoned, and it’s all locked up, but she manages to pry open a grimy window and clamber in before anyone sees her in the very unflattering hospital gown and sweat pants. There’s no dust on the furniture inside, which seems odd, but Lacey lets it slide. What matters is that her wardrobe is there, sparkling and shimmery and shining with blue flashes that make her blink and raise a hand to her suddenly spinning head.

The nurses and doctors at the hospital (and a man in a dark suit with a cane at his side) would probably tell her to rest, but Lacey’s tired of resting. She feels like she’s about to explode, all the restless energy inside her seething, demanding a release, so she cuts off her hospital bracelet, jumps in the shower, dresses in the clothes that make her feel immediately more comfortable and beautiful. Her hair’s straighter than she remembers—proof that the hospital shampoo isn’t up to her standards at all—but she clips it back, and then she’s out the door and down the street to the Rabbit Hole.

This, at least, hasn’t changed. Maybe the regulars look confused at first, but she’s been gone a while and they eventually recognize her. Things have been…different…lately, and she likes being here, in a place familiar and comfortable and _the same._ There’s no Mr. Gold here (and maybe she asks about him, but that’s simple curiosity, no more), no strange stories about another woman ( _Belle_ , and just the memory, slanted in a Scottish accent, rings loud over the music playing in the background), no reminders of flames in a rainy night or a blue glow over a bullet-ridden shoulder (no pirates or magicians or pleading eyes that can scorch straight through her). Just soothing liquor, the steady hum of people around her, and the feel of the pool cue in her hands and the clack against the balls (erasing the discomfort brought by her accident).

But then Mr. Gold comes. And he looks at her as if she’s a stranger (as if she’s not Belle). And he stares (“Do-do you remember me?” he asks, as if he’s the sort of man who could ever be forgotten), and his hand on her arm surges through her like an electrical storm. 

She plays it cool (“Guy who visited me in hospital,” she says, while the kiss he gave her and his hands on her and his disbelieving hope when they agreed to help each other run through her mind like molten silver), shrugs it off, ignores him. She pretends she doesn’t even notice when he turns his back on her and walks away. She most definitely does _not_ watch the door to see if he returns.

She’s Lacey, independent and free, and she doesn’t need anyone (most especially an older man with a bad reputation who looks at her as if he might cry). Things are back to normal, and that means no Mr. Gold. No Belle. No magic. No hospitals.

Just her.

Just Lacey.

\---

Mr. Gold comes back.

He stands at her side, and he talks. Just a few words, barely anything of substance at all. But she listens. She tries to overwhelm him with facts she knows he isn’t familiar with, tries to drown him out with music, tries to pretend he means nothing at all. But he follows her, and he tries again, and he stands right in front of her, and he holds out his hand (the one that gleamed with molten light beneath the flicker of flames) as if begging her.

So maybe she’s done more than _casually_ ask about him. Maybe she’s curious and intrigued as to why he cares so much. Maybe she just feels sorry for him, this man no one loves, so lonely and desperate that he’s stooped to pretending she’s some perfect woman he’s made up.

Maybe.

Or maybe there’s something in the shifting darkness of his eyes, the sad quirk of his lips, the plea for her to look past the whispers of his ruthlessness and his power and his temper. Maybe she remembers something about a phone-call and the feel of his hands beneath hers. Maybe she’s more captivated by him than she wants to admit.

But she’s Lacey, and she loves a challenge. So she says yes.

Then she walks away (so she doesn’t have to watch him do the same).

\---

He’s jumpy and nervous. He shifts in his seat and fumbles the menu and keeps his hands clasped in his lap. He makes half-hearted efforts at conversation and denies the rumors about him and almost breaks down when she throws out a cliché. 

If this is Mr. Gold, she thinks, the rumors are blown _far_ out of proportion.

She tries. Really, she does. But there’s no excitement here, no danger, nothing to make adrenaline shoot through her body and cause the world to explode at the corners of her eyes and the rafters to shake. There’s no spark, nothing to explain why his touch had seemed anything special earlier.

He reaches out for her, once, but instead of fire and passion and heat, she’s only splashed with sticky tea. She tries once more (for a reason she can’t explain), patting him on the shoulder as she passes him for the restroom.

But there’s nothing. No spark. No lightning. No reason to stay.

So she leaves.

\---

Keith is pushy and arrogant and a bit smarmy, but his hand is warm when he catches her wrist, and there’s the flame of lust in his eyes, and that has to be better than tears and sad smiles and mild-mannered pawnbrokers. He’s aggressive and he slams her up against the wall and he bruises her lips, but she’s been a long time in the hospital, a long time without _feeling_ , and this is enough to remind her she’s alive.

When Mr. Gold arrives, it’s suddenly and wholly. Lacey is surrounded by arms and lips and firm muscles, and then there is nothing, only bristling rage and horrible, terrible fury crashing from his eyes as he brandishes his cane at her would-be lover, and he crowds the alley—crowds the whole town, as if Storybrooke as a whole isn’t big enough to contain him. If he’d tried this earlier, she might have been impressed, but she’s coming down from the high of _sensation_ , and she doesn’t like the complete cessation of the overwhelming feelings.

Keith slinks away as quickly as he came, and Lacey wants only to get away. But Mr. Gold’s hand is on her shoulder, and she doesn’t feel captivation—she feels trapped, and there’s nothing she hates more.

She doesn’t look back as she walks away.

\---

When she finds him with Keith, the taller man who’d completely encompassed her in his hold now flat on his back on the ground and helpless, it’s as if he’s another man entirely (a third man, and that’s an awful lot of personality for one lone man to hold, layered within him). Mr. Gold towers over Keith, and there is something there, something she hadn’t seen before. There is power and charisma and danger and menace. There is unbridled passion and boundless emotion and a depth of _caring_ so deep, so vast, that it could completely overwhelm her. 

“You really are as dark as people say,” she remarks, strolling closer, lured in by the brilliance, the heat, the _power_ of the flames.

He stares at her, his head cocked to the side, and finally, he’s not seeing Belle. Finally, he’s seeing Lacey. 

She holds her breath. Wonders if he’ll leave her. If he’ll turn around and walk away. (Wonders if he cares for her at all outside of his delusions of this Belle.)

Instead, he straightens, smiles. “Darker, dearie,” he tells her (and there’s a thrill in her heart, a flutter in her stomach, at the endearment). “Much darker.”

And he turns back to his prey (on the ground and beaten because he dared touch _Lacey_ , not Belle, not anyone else, just _her_ ).

And Lacey smiles.

\---

It’s easy, being with Mr. Gold. It’s invigorating, being with the man everyone in town fears. It’s startling, being with a man who can’t decide if he’s a grief-stricken lover, a tender suitor, or a dangerous man. He takes her to the Rabbit Hole but demands the whole of her attention, buys her drinks but never lets her pay him with a kiss, opens the door for her but snarls when she flirts. He’s a mixture of old world charm and immediate charisma, and Lacey finds that instead of growing bored with him, she can’t keep away.

“Maybe it’s an appropriate name, after all,” Lacey muses when they stand in front of the Rabbit Hole in the morning (Mr. Gold can’t keep away from her either, if the sunrise wake-up call on the phone she was given in the hospital is any indication).

“The bar?” Mr. Gold raises an eyebrow, sharp and sardonic.

Lacey smiles a secretive smile. “Maybe,” she purrs (because she’s not about to admit to him she feels, sometimes, like a rabbit caught under the dangerous stare of a hawk).

“There are better places to spend our time,” he tells her.

“Oh?” It’s her turn to arch an eyebrow (a reflection of him, and she shouldn’t like that, but it makes his lips twitch so it’s worth it). “Like where? Not many places in town are open this early.”

“Oh, I think my shop could offer you quite a selection,” he retorts (and she’s definitely a rabbit caught, because now he’s luring her in to his lair).

“Lacey?”

Mr. Gold turns, hand taut on his cane, shoulders stiff, bristling and defensive.

Lacey gives an inviting smile to the man walking toward her (blonde and tall, and she remembers him chastising a nurse for her). He returns the smile easily. 

“Whale!” Mr. Gold snaps, and Whale gives him a tiny nod. “Was there something you needed?”

“Just thought I’d come say hello. Haven’t seen you for a while, Lacey.” Whale casts a smile more suggestive than her own her way, and Mr. Gold is suddenly a graceful, lethal blur of motion that ends with the doctor flat on his back on the ground.

Lacey’s startled, but she’s also pleased. 

She may be a rabbit with a hawk, but the hawk moves at her command. She may be a woman he can send away when he doesn’t want her involved in his conversations, but she’s a woman who possesses the keys he hands her (his fingers caressing her wrist). 

She may be caught, but so is he.

The edge of danger (the temptation in the merest brush of his hands) only makes him all the more appealing.

\---

“So it’s, uh…so it’s true,” she says, triumphant to have caught him in his game (scared because magic shouldn’t exist, but then, neither should this town-wide amnesia of her). “You, uh…you really can do magic.”

“I think you might want to pour yourself another drink,” he tells her (and he’s not fazed at all by this talk of magic and tears and a woman out there in danger). 

Lacey lets him pour her a drink, watches him carefully. She thought his cane and his temper and his blade-sharp words were reason enough to be afraid of him, but listening to him talk of spells and deals and bad memories makes her think that there’s even more behind the universal fear of him.

And yet _she’s_ not afraid. He speaks of magic and he pulls out potions that glitter with rainbow colors and he tells her of the curse of Dark One. But he avoids her eyes (as if afraid she will turn away) and he admits that magic drives away the people he cares about (heedless of the vulnerability he exposes to her) and he summons a glittering, expensive necklace (just for her). Magic or not, he’s still her Mr. Gold, the leash still in her hand even if he has one for her too.

She’s not afraid. Not until he touches her.

Shivers run up and down her spine as he clasps the necklace. Quakes start in the pit of her stomach and move up into her heart as he so carefully pulls her hair free of the diamonds. Lightning-limned lethargy fills her as she leans back into him.

Well and truly caught, then, she thinks, because she should be bored of him by now, should have moved on long past now, should have grown tired of his smooth steps away when she tries to caress his face or neck, his distractions when she moves to kiss him, his tendency to look at her with almost-tears when he thinks she’s not paying attention. She shouldn’t care about him…but she does.

“We can be together forever,” she tells him, tempts him, tests him (because she might as well get _something_ from this infatuation).

But he moves back, his hands slide away, and there’s once more a gulf between them. 

She hates it.

“It’s complicated,” he says, but it really isn’t. He’s hers, now, hers forever, and she will fight to keep him, even if that means getting rid of some silly boy. They belong together, darkness and fire, thunder and lightning, black shadows and blue shimmers, a study in contrasts, like calling to like. 

“I thought you were a man who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way,” she challenges him.

And he pulls her back to his side (violent and abrupt, decisive and bold; the dangerous layer, the predator who can beat a man to death with a cane, coming to the fore to glitter with reflective fire in his eyes).

Together forever, she thinks, and she welcomes the flames consuming her at his proximity. Her Mr. Gold. Her sorcerer.

Her Dark One.

\---

She doesn’t appreciate being sent away every time he wants to hold a conversation. He looks at her and he doesn’t see Belle anymore (and that’s good, she tells herself, even if it does mean there’s a hard edge to the corners of his eyes and the creases around his mouth), but he doesn’t know her entirely yet if he thinks she’ll let him push her aside whenever it pleases him.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” she says. “I can help you.”

“Can you?” He studies her, carefully, a hint of calculation in his voice. He keeps his hands on the worktable before him (he does have good drinks here, in his pawnshop, but more than that, she likes the way she’s the only one he invites into the back with him), and it’s hard to believe that such ordinary hands can produce such magical things.

“I can.” She cants her chin up in the air, gives him a sly smile. “For instance, I know that your earlier conversation with those straight arrows in here looking to save their enemy means they’re distracted right now.”

His eyes narrow, reassessing, wary (she feels a thrill to know she has the whole of his attention). “Oh?”

“Yeah.” She sidles closer, until she has to look up to keep her gaze on his eyes. Her hands slide up to his shoulders without her conscious direction. His muscles tense beneath her touch; his hands are motionless on the table. “Means they’ll be busy. So, if you decide to go look into the problem of a certain someone who might prove to be trouble for you down the road…?”

Some of his layers are exposed in front of her (just for an instant, an unguarded moment), shock and grief and loss and horror and _terror_ , and then the shutters slide down and he’s once more her dangerous, powerful Dark One. His hands tense, one over the other, until suddenly he reaches up and grasps hold of hers, pulling them away, clasping them in front of his chest. It’s a firm hold, solid and real and _alive_ , and Lacey lets her eyes shine with the thoughts swarming her mind.

But he steps back. Her hands fall back to her sides.

“An interesting proposition,” he murmurs. 

Lacey lets out a frustrated sigh and rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m going down to the Rabbit Hole for a game or two of pool—you do what you want.”

“And will you come back?” There is a hollow note in his voice, a tiny sliver of fragility lurking in his lilting accent. He tries to hide it behind narrowed eyes and arched brow, but his hands give him away, white and stiff over his cane now. 

“Maybe,” she says archly, and is rewarded by the feel of his left hand grasping hold of her waist and pulling her close to him. His breath is hot and fierce against her cheek, his hand sending tremors through her bloodstream, and she is awake and alive and on fire, and she will never tire of this feeling, this draw that makes her run her hands up his chest and back onto his shoulders (where they belong).

“Remember my reputation,” he warns her. “You don’t want to see just how dark I can be.”

“Maybe I do,” she retorts with a laugh, and it’s her turn to dance away, teasing him with what he can’t have. 

She pretends she doesn’t see the way he swallows and looks away (not desire or lust; sorrow and hurt). She pretends it doesn’t bother her to turn and leave him alone in his dark room. She pretends she can really walk away from him (even if it is only for a moment, an hour).

But she knows she’ll be back. And she knows he’ll be waiting for her (for _Belle_ ).

\---

She comes back, but Mr. Gold doesn’t. Not her Mr. Gold. Not _her_ Dark One.

She gets back before he does (the Rabbit Hole is abandoned and silent for some reason), uses the keys he gave her and walks into the backroom. For a moment, she’s tempted to explore, but the place is dusty and boring without Mr. Gold there. She heads toward the cabinet where he keeps the liquor, but before she can get there, she hears the bell over the front door tinkle.

“Mr. Gold?” she calls, ready to invite him to share a drink with her. The curtain flutters behind her when she pushes past it, and she can feel a ghost of a breeze on her neck as she stumbles to a halt.

Mr. Gold is standing in the middle of his shop, but he’s not large and intimidating and magnetic. He’s not powerful and calculating and wickedly clever. Instead, he’s tiny and broken and wounded, and he didn’t look this old even when he had to be helped up from the dirty road by the deputy.

“Mr. Gold?” she says again (and she hates the breathy sound turning her question into a whisper). 

“Belle,” she thinks he whispers, but then he looks up at her (he makes a valiant effort to gather himself, but he still looks brittle and hollow) and says instead, “Baelfire. My son. He’s…he’s dead.”

And for the first time, Lacey doesn’t know what to do.

He stands there, motionless, silent, and she thinks that if he moves, he will crumble away into dust. And all she can do is stand where she is and watch him slowly, torturously pick up the pieces of his heart and stitch them imperfectly back together in an uneven, bleeding mess.

She wishes she were anywhere else. She wishes she hadn’t come back. She wishes she didn’t care about him (this man who was supposed to be bold and dark and scintillating and who is, instead, complicated and mysterious and vulnerable). 

She wishes she were Belle, so she could hold him and help him and heal him.

But she’s Lacey. So she stands there, and she _wishes_. It’s what she’s good at, the only thing she knows, to wish and crave and luxuriate in what she has.

Funny. It used to be enough.

\---

“There’s nothing we can do.” His voice is calm. His hands are steady. His eyes slide away from hers. “The trigger is magical, and once it’s ignited, there’s nothing to be done.”

“I thought you were powerful!” Her own voice is a little bit shrill, and adrenaline races through her, but this adrenaline is not a good sensation. This is _fear_. Terror. The realization of mortality—and she doesn’t like it. “You can do anything!”

Mr. Gold watches her, and there is more heartache in that look than any one being should ever possess. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s too late.”

She watches him turn away, and anger obliterates everything else. “Would you say that if your son were still alive?” she demands. It’s a cheap shot, a low blow, and she knows it even as she says it.

She shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter. He just told her she’s going to die in a matter of minutes, and that should more than give her an excuse to lash out.

But his shoulders hunch in on themselves, armor he dons too late. He flinches, and Lacey wants to take the words back.

“I’m sorry,” he says again (and all she can see is a man kneeling on wet asphalt before her, fleeing through glass doors, coming into her hospital room and looking down at their joined hands as if at magic). “If I could save you, I would. But even if you crossed the town line again,” and he pauses to take in a shuddering breath, “you couldn’t get far enough away in time.”

“So…we’re going to die?” A sob is hiding in the back of her throat, scrabbling to get free. He was supposed to give her immortality. She was supposed to have weeks and months and years to cure him of his aversion to touch, to seduce him into hugs and kisses and touches in the dark, to fall in love with him and make him see _Lacey_ and have that be _enough_. They were supposed to be together forever.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, then firmly adds, “Lacey.”

And then he is stepping up beside her and he is pulling her into his arms, and he only holds her tighter when her tears wet the handkerchief sitting in his breast pocket. She clutches at him, holds on as desperately as if she is drowning. She wants to beg him not to leave her, but she doesn’t. Instead, she only tightens her grip on his jacket and feels the ground begin to come apart beneath their feet.

\---

There are trees in the middle of the street, vines weaving through the shop’s exterior, and grass sprouting through the floor of the front room. The backroom, though, is an oasis (one that’s rapidly shrinking to nothing), and she stands in there with Mr. Gold and tries to ignore the fact that her world is being erased in front of her very eyes. “We’re not from this world,” Mr. Gold had explained. “The failsafe seeks to return everything to the way it was before the curse.”

She wonders if that means she’ll suddenly remember being Belle, just before the failsafe kills her (because she’s not stupid and Mr. Gold is careful to call her Lacey but sometimes he looks at her and she’s _only_ Belle, and everyone else in town has multiple names and they don’t remember _her_ at all, and she knows, now, that Mr. Gold isn’t the sort of man to make a woman up out of nothing). She wonders if she’ll remember loving Mr. Gold before the end. She wonders if he’ll realize that she maybe-kind-of-almost-already loves him (she wonders when _she_ realized it, thinks it was when he took her in his arms and said her name and apologized, for the first time, to _her_ instead of to Belle).

“Mr. Gold,” she says. She’s not quite sure why, because they’ve used up all their words and she’s used up all her tears and he’s just plain used up, going through the motions and pretending that he’s all right even though his son is gone. But she says his name anyway, because it means something. Because she needs to remind herself she’s still here.

“To the end of the world,” he says, and he pours her a drink. 

A couple days ago, that would have been enough to make her laugh and tease and try to corner him so she can finally figure out whether all those reserves of emotion he conceals would erupt and overwhelm and consume her should she kiss him. Now…it doesn’t seem right. 

“Come on, it’ll help numb it,” he coaxes, so she agrees, and reaches for the glass. But she’s clumsy, and the cup topples on its side (wrong and broken).

The whole world is coming apart around them, but the spilled whiskey seems like the greater crime. Especially to him. 

He’s wounded and bent and brittle, but he recaptures a hint of his spirit, the rage and power she saw unleashed in that alleyway with Keith, enough to shout at her, to rend and destroy with his words, to remind her she isn’t who he wants.

“I said I’m sorry!” she tells him, and she is. She’s sorry they’re going to die, sorry she couldn’t hold him when he wanted to cry like he’d held her when she’d wept. She’s sorry she’s not the woman he wants her to be, and maybe she should be angry instead, but she can’t summon up that spark of emotion. She feels numb already (even without the liquor), as if there should be more here. More between them. More to _her._

But there’s only her. Only Lacey.

Only Lacey, and a chipped cup he conjures up with far more reverence than he did the necklace she locked away in her apartment. 

“That cup again,” she sighs. But it means something to him, and he avoids her touch rather than crowds her now, and she _wants_ to know what it means (even if it only has to do with Belle). So she tries to be as brave as he thinks she is (or was) and asks, “What _is_ it?”

It just sits there, innocent and white with a few blue accents, that damaged rim the first thing to catch the eye. It doesn’t transform into a magical potion or a weapon that can stop the earthquakes gouging through the town or some key to return everything to normal, to _right._

It’s just a cup.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it, she can tell (he meets her eyes with sincerity and his hands have stopped shaking and he’s set his cane aside entirely). “Let’s not fight.”

He hands the cup to her (just like last time, only not, because he lets her pick it up and he doesn’t cradle her hands to ensure she doesn’t drop it). He picks up his own glass, taps it against hers, and Lacey watches him carefully. 

She’s not stupid.

Liquor comes in many shapes and sizes, but not usually from a vial similar to many he has locked away in his cabinet.

“It’ll help numb the pain,” he’d said, and she wonders whose pain he means. His? Belle’s? Or _hers?_

But he’s her Dark One. He’s gentle where he should be vindictive and vulnerable where he should be ruthless and soft where he should be dark. He’s not wild and untamed and dangerous as she thought he was. But he’s Mr. Gold, and he came to visit her in the hospital, and he left her with a kiss she wishes she could repeat, and he wrapped himself up in layers he thought she would like, and he calls her Lacey even when he wants to call her Belle.

And they’re going to die, anyway.

Lacey tips back the cup, and drinks the potion.

\---

The transformation, when it comes, is sudden and complete. One instant, she is Lacey, the next she is Belle, but with all the missing pieces filled in. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe, because what if this disappears? What if she looks to her right and sees Mr. Gold and not Rumplestiltskin? 

What if _he_ sees Lacey and not Belle?

But he takes one look at her (just one, and she remembers just one glance from him, years ago, before he pointed his finger at her and named her his price). One look, and his molten brown eyes turn liquid and his face crumples (he’s crying, and she remembers calling him back to her in a library and watching him try to hide his tears). One look, and already she’s crying, too, her very soul aching with all that has occurred and all that has happened and all she was not there for. She promised him she would be waiting when he came back.

But she wasn’t.

“Belle,” he says, and it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard (she remembers a hundred _Belles_ , a dozen _sweethearts_ , a handful of _darlings_ , a scant few _dearies_ , and too many _Laceys_ ; none of them sounded this open, this vulnerable, this _needy_ ). He’s here, and so is she—he fought for her. He didn’t give up and he came for her and he _tried_. He kept her close, kept her safe, kept her whole, brought her back, and she has rarely doubted his love, but she never will again.

Because he’s the one waiting for her to come back to him.

Her hands are reaching for him already. He’s warm and whole beneath her touch (he’s bleeding all over her and this pawnshop, pricked full of invisible wounds, his heart gushing out lifeblood), trembling and shaking and _quivering_ , and he is something more than Rumplestiltskin and deeper than Mr. Gold and frailer than the Dark One. 

But still hers.

“Rumple,” she tries to say, and names have power, but they are nothing next to touch. Nothing next to the feel of his lips welcoming hers, his arm encompassing her, his hand on her shoulder, his tears mixed with hers, his breath as necessary as oxygen. _This_ is power. _This_ is magic. _This_ is love.

The kiss doesn’t last long enough (eternity wouldn’t be long enough; she remembers asking for it, though). But she’s still touching him, and he’s still holding her close, so it’s enough. 

But not for him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says brokenly. His eyes hold all the loneliness and grief he’s been fighting off for centuries—with spinning, with planning, with deal-making, with darkness. His masks are gone, obliterated, crumbled away into nothing, and there is only a bereft father, a man, standing before her. He’s hollowed out and empty, and she’s his only lifeline, and she holds him as tightly as she can (so he doesn’t slip away from her; so she doesn’t slip away from him). “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up to die. But I needed you.”

“You lost your son,” she breathes (and she remembers a man, fierce and angry and brave, wrestling Rumplestiltskin away from a docile Dr. Whale). 

He freezes. Still. Vulnerable. Oh so very fragile.

Her hand caresses a path from the top of his hair to the side of his face to his neck. Gentle. Soft. Reaffirming. (Possessive, taking back what Lacey—Regina—tried to steal from her.)

“I’m so sorry,” she says, because she didn’t even get a chance to know Baelfire and he knew only Lacey and he never got to realize his father was still there, trapped behind the vestiges of the Dark One. Rumplestiltskin came all this way for him (sent her away and almost drove her away again, all for the sake of his son), but there will never be any closure. Never be forgiveness or atonement. Never be restoration, and how can she not weep for him, for them both? 

She touches him, this broken man she’s fallen in love with so many times, and she feels his heart break (and how many times can a heart break before there is nothing left but fine dust even magic can’t repair with a wave of a hand?).

There are no words for this, but she doesn’t need to heal him. She doesn’t need to make him stop grieving. She just needs to be here. To hold him. To love him. To grieve _with_ him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

The Dark One is immortal and powerful enough to destroy an entire world, unable to be contained or bottled or caged. But Rumplestiltskin is a man with a heart and a past and a capacity for love so vast and irrevocable that she can only try to live up to it, so she is able to wrap him in her arms, keep him steady in the circle of her love, take his battered and bleeding heart and hold it safe inside her own.

“I’ve failed.” His tiny confession (false and flawed and as wrong as he can sometimes be, but so sincere it weeps for him) flutters its way inside her, writhes deep, and all she can do is turn her face into his neck (her own breath against his pulse point reminding him to keep breathing for her) and hold him harder, tighter, longer. “I’ve failed.”

More than anything, she wishes she could take his tears and his loss and his guilt and heal them, show him the man she sees in him, erase this fractured self-image of his with a brush of her lips, with no more than her mouth covering his, warmth and pressure and heat combining with the truest of loves to break his most disabling curse of all.

But she can’t.

So she holds him, and she strokes him, and she lets her tears fall on his neck, and she feels her heart beat in time with his, and she hopes with everything she has that her touch affects him as deeply as his does hers.

\---

He conjures up a coat for her, beautiful and long and concealing—but most importantly, all _Belle_. Lacey’s somewhere deep inside her, Belle thinks, hidden and restrained and seeping away into the cracks. The darkest, ugliest, flimsiest parts of herself, and she does not like knowing what lies in the shadows of her own soul, even if they are fading already, muted and dimmed. But she looks at Rumplestiltskin, and she wonders if his curse simply brought out the darkest, ugliest, flimsiest parts of _him,_ if he’s been living with them staring back at him every time he looks at his reflection for untold centuries (and maybe that’s why he hates himself, because he’s forgotten all but the wickedest facets of his character; maybe that’s why he can’t look in a mirror without cringing and turning away or shattering it into a million pieces).

“The people who triggered the failsafe have holed up at the harbor,” he says, standing there before her with the coat still in his hands, a bright splash of color against the black of his suit. “If Emma and her family have managed to stop the destruction of Storybrooke, as it seems, then I imagine that’s where they’ll be.”

Truth, in Rumplestiltskin’s case, is often about what remains unsaid, and Belle hasn’t failed to notice that ever since he gathered himself up enough to step away from her and collected his cane to walk outside (to see why they hadn’t been overtaken by the forest without magic), he’s refused to speak of anything but the royal family and what they must have done to save the remnants of their world.

There’s so much she wants to say in return. So much she wants to bring up and go through and correct (hurtful questions shouted at him in the rain while he knelt before her, so full of pain and terror; a cup hurled across the room, heedless of his own heartache; a rendezvous in an alley with a sheriff who once offered to buy her for an hour; laughing encouragement of violence and dismissive scorn of his gentleness). But he is grieving and his mask is paper-thin and she doesn’t know if she should risk him losing it again.

There’s a wall between them. A barrier that’s never been there before. The memory of being strangers. The memory of one of them being a stranger and the other one not. The memory…no, just _memories_. Memories standing between them so that she’s afraid to speak at all and he’s afraid to move forward and hand her the coat.

Always before, she’s been the brave one. But she’s never hurt him so badly before.

He swallows, then he sets the cane aside and steps forward (and he is oh so very brave, for her), offers her the coat. “Here,” he says softly. “If you’ll have it.”

A small smile creases her lips, because she _remembers_ that. “Why, thank you,” she replies, and his own smile (faint, pale, an echo of a past action) emboldens her. She matches his step forward and turns so he can help her into the coat. It’s warm and soft, but it cannot compete with the feel of his hands, fingers brushing against her arms, her shoulders, as he slips the garment on her, his palms resting against her shoulders when he’s done. She leans back into him, and she’s never done this before, but it feels familiar (Lacey leaned back when he clasped a diamond necklace around her throat).

“Belle,” he whispers (her name thrums with blatant power that makes her eyes flutter shut). “I love you.”

She wants to weep. She wants to laugh. All she can do is turn and throw her arms around him and place a quick, shuddering kiss to his mouth. “I love you, Rumplestiltskin,” she replies (and this has always before been a confession, a bold move, but now it’s a _reply_ , because he said it first). “Forever,” she adds, but that only sounds like an echo of Lacey, not of their long ago deal, so she says, “In any world, in every world, I love you.”

He doesn’t believe her (he never does). His lips quirk (his eyes still haunted) and he places a warm kiss on her brow, but he doesn’t say anything. She wants to tell him that her heart broke when a trapped and tired nobody heard his dying confession over the phone. She wants to tell him that Lacey drank the potion because she wanted to make him happy. She wants to tell him that it’s easy to love him and that she’s fallen in love with him a dozen times—a hundred, over and over again, in a Dark Castle and a stately house, in Sherwood Forest and the forest around a well, in two libraries, in a dungeon and Granny’s Diner, in his pawnshop and his carriage.

She wants to tell him she’s sorry she hurt him (sorry she became the weapon she vowed she’d never be, the chain that tied him down and distracted him from his son).

But Baelfire is gone, and that is far more important than any apology she can make.

So she smiles at him and tilts her head until he bends his own to kiss her again, lips familiar and sweet against hers (Lacey was right—the feel of him does overwhelm and consume her, and it’s all _hers_ , for he ensured that Lacey had no part in it). “I love you,” she says again, and maybe that will be enough to cover everything else, to salve the wounds she inflicted.

His smile, this time, is a bit more real.

\---

She wraps her hands around his elbow, clings tight, paces her steps in time with his, and it reminds her of a walk to a town line. Reminds her of a walk away from a bar on a dark evening. Memories converge and mingle, linear except in how they tangle and snarl one against another, Lacey’s self-interest clashing with Belle’s selflessness, carelessness contrasted against courage, Lacey’s hunger for excitement a dark shadow of Belle’s own thirst for adventure.

Her breath comes short and stuttered, because she doesn’t _want_ to be Lacey, to be so insular, so wrapped up in herself that she’s heedless of the hurts and the strengths and the needs of someone else, so bold and thoughtless that she moves from one thing to the next without any forethought or planning, without common sense or integrity. It’s not _her_ , but it must be, because she can feel those inclinations inside her now, lying in wait, ready to insinuate themselves ever more deeply into her conscious mind.

“Belle,” Rumplestiltskin says, and she’s not sure if he has something to say or if he only senses her distress and wants to reassure her he’s there.

And he is here. At her side. Head tilted toward her. A heated, solid presence walking with a tap-step-step as familiar to her as an imp’s dancing prowl once was. 

“Rumple,” she replies, and she stops. They’re in a hurry, rushing to the harbor so he can find out what happened to save the town and banish the encroaching forest and return the streets and buildings to normal—but he hurries more out of habit than real curiosity, wants to know because collecting knowledge is just what he does. There’s no real urgency, no immediacy, because he’s adrift in a sea without purpose or goal or direction. Baelfire is gone, and she can see the desolation in his eyes, hear it in his voice, feel it in the desperate neediness of his every touch (needing something to hold onto, someone to hold him back). Baelfire is gone, and he has no reason to hurry, no reason to care, no reason to keep going.

When she turns to face him (keeping hold of his arm because it’s impossible to even contemplate letting go), he matches her move, action and reaction, mirror images of one another.

“Rumple,” she says again, because his name is easy and apologies are hard and they are both so close to collapsing should the wrong word escape her (wounds and scars and hurts riddle them both so full of holes that she’s afraid they will crumple and fall to the ground any second now). 

She wants to tell him it will be all right (but how can she when his son is dead and they cannot change that?). She wants to convince him she truly does love him (but how can she hope to succeed when it’s taken the Queen—taken Lacey—only days to undo the decades of inroads Belle has made on his heart?). She wants to throw herself in his arms and cling to him and beg him to reassure her that the terrible things she did and said and thought as Lacey (and she _hates_ the very name) aren’t truly part of her and that they were just cruel, clever snares planted so cunningly within her by the evil Queen (but how can she ask that of him when he tries so hard not to lie to her?).

So in the end, she can only hold onto him and step close enough so that only the starkly contrasting colors of their coats can tell where she ends and he begins (blue against black, skies and seas against shadows and starless space). In the end, she can only let out a little of what she feels, say a fraction of what she thinks.

“I didn’t…I’m not her,” she stammers. “Our cup, and magic, and it’s _not_ the wrong people that you know,” (because out of every memory, _this_ matters the most, that he might think her the wrong person for him to know, that he might think she does not truly care for him so long as he has his magic) “and magic isn’t what drives me away. I mean…you won’t lose me.” (An ineffectual promise, she knows, when he already has lost her, again and again and again, and for a man who’s been so deeply hurt before, a man who thinks he will always be abandoned and left behind, she is astonished and awed and amazed that he is willing to open his heart to her _again_.) “I _do_ love you, Rumplestiltskin, and names don’t change that.”

“Shh, shh.” His hand comes up, between them, fingers brush against her lips, stilling her mass of unintelligible words. “Belle, sweetheart, this isn’t you. Regina did this to you. _You_ are the woman in the hospital, who offered to help and were happy I didn’t die. _You_ are the woman standing here, apologizing for something _I_ should be sorry for—for not protecting you, for letting this happen. For not being able to fix it.” He looks away, but only for a second, an instant (hiding his regret, his guilt, somewhere shallow and close, an unfilled grave occupied mostly by _Baelfire_ ). Then his eyes return to hers and she does not understand how she could not have loved him immediately, at the first glimpse of these worn and haunted, tender and sweet eyes. “What happened was regrettable,” he adds, awkwardly. “But you’re here, you’re all right, that’s what matters.”

“You didn’t give up,” she tells him, and here, finally, are the right words. Benediction and forgiveness and approval all at once, and her eyes shine with fervent light as she smiles up at him. “You love me, and…you fought for me.”

The right corner of his mouth turns up slightly but it doesn’t reach his eyes (the expression he gives when he wants to smile but cannot quite remember how). “Yes, well…”

Little words that mean nothing. A message garbled and unclear. Monosyllabic words and shifting, sliding glances full of dark desires and shadowed regrets. But he’s the deal-maker, the spinner of words, the imp who can play and twist and mold them into presentations and temptations and misdirections—so that he cannot find words with her, that he cannot use them as he always does with others…that means more than pretty speeches and flowery declarations of love ever could.

They begin walking again, side by side, steps matched. The sea is audible now, waves in the distance, salt scenting the air, and then, very quietly, Rumplestiltskin says, “You were worth it. You _are_ worth it.”

And he can find the right words after all, sometimes, at the perfect moment, the most beautiful instant (can touch her so deeply with the things he says only to her; and she remembers a phone-call and a dying confession and his constant, protective presence at Lacey’s side even while his son was in town).

Belle blinks away tears, and sets her brow to his shoulder, and knows that they will be all right (they will heal and move forward and one day not be so broken and bent and misshapen). His breath stirring her hair, the ripple of his arm tightening beneath her hand, the smile finally beginning to reach his eyes, these are more restorative than any number of magic potions or fairy wands.

“Belle,” he breathes (prayer and salvation and plea, and all of it making her heart dance shyly in her chest), and that word is the most powerful of all, for with it, he says everything she needs to hear.

Her hand slides down, and she weaves her fingers through his.

“Rumple,” she replies. And it is enough.

\---

“You’re not coming back. Are you?” The question escapes her, and she knows the answer already, because it’s there in his eyes, in the way he avoids her gaze, in his hands fallen away from hers. It’s there in the spell he has already prepared for her, the words of goodbye he spoke so quickly, the explanations he spilled at her and David’s feet. 

His son is gone, and so is he.

Belle wants to weep. She wants to scream and cry and shout and take him by the shoulders and shake him until he realizes that she _needs_ him, she _wants_ him, she _loves_ him and forever is more than a word.

But his son is gone, and he is lost and desolate, and he is also brave and noble—everything she has always wanted to be; everything she has always seen in him—and how can she tie him back now when she has always refused to do so before?

She wants to run back to town, give the cloaking spell and the instructions to the first person she meets, and then rush back here. She wants to jump aboard this pirate ship that holds only bad memories and now carries the two who populate her nightmares (a Queen with a cage and a prison cell and mocking laughter; a pirate with a hook and a gun and dead vengeance in his eyes), wants to cling to Rumplestiltskin’s side and prove to him that she is here for him and she will not leave him and she can be his reason to live, to come back, to learn to smile again.

But his son is dead, and all that’s left to him is the search for atonement.

“He’s gone,” he tells her (and even now, there is a note of awful confusion, bewilderment, as if he cannot fathom an existence without his Baelfire), “and I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.”

She wants to tell him that the man who was brave enough to come rushing to Dr. Whale’s defense, the man who wrapped his arms around Rumplestiltskin (when he could have shouted at him, could have pointed a weapon at him, could have simply knocked him aside, could have done anything but chose instead to put his arms around his father) to keep him from darkness, the man who berated him for avoiding him—that man was good and whole and he would want Rumplestiltskin to live. He would not want his father to die, to leave behind everyone who still loves him and seek redemption in death.

But she remembers looking into Rumplestiltskin’s eyes when their cup lay in shards at his feet and his heart lay crumpled and bleeding in his chest. She remembers brushing past him in an alley when his shock and his grief and his bitter resignation (and of them all, she hates _that_ look the most) were scrawled all across his features. She remembers hurting him, cutting him to ribbons and smiling at him so beguilingly all the while. She remembers desolation in his gaze and bereavement in his posture and loss consuming his soul.

So she places her hands on his shoulders (to hold onto him, to store up another memory for the coming days of loneliness, to keep him here with her for just one more fleeting moment), and she says, “I understand. But I also know that the future isn’t always what it seems.”

Once, she thought she traded away all hope of happiness in return for her family’s survival.

Once, she thought she would never see her beloved Rumplestiltskin again.

Once, she thought she had failed in her desperate desire to mean more to him than magic.

Once, she thought she was lost and alone and afraid and the only future for her was a basement cell.

Once, she thought she would be happy with lust and dark affection and the thrill of excitement.

But here she is now, and she is alive and free and with the man she loves, and she refuses to believe that this is all there is.

She has hope. She always has hope, and if there is one thing she can give him (if he can no longer trust her love, thanks to a kiss that brought no memories and a shattered cup and a flirtatious reflection of herself; if he cannot see the light, because his son broke his heart and rejected him and died all before he could make amends), it is the capacity to hope. The ability to look into the future and see more than darkness and shadows and horrors.

His son is dead, but she is still here, and she will not let him go.

She will drop her hands (in a moment, when she has summoned her strength and what bravery she has left to her), and she will walk away (so she does not have to watch him sail out of her world; as brave as he thinks she is, she has not yet been able to be the one to watch _him_ leave), and she will do as he asked (because it is a good task, a noble goal, and he trusts her to do it and that _means_ something), and she will wait for him (and this time, she _will_ be there, for him, when he returns).

She will do as he wishes and stay behind.

But she will not let him go.

He’s hers. He was hers the instant she gave him her forever, the moment he first put his hand on her waist and escorted her into their future. He was hers when he did not punish her for releasing his prisoner and he smiled at her hug. He was hers when he first told her of his son and let her go free. He was hers when she came back and her kiss brought what she saw in him to the surface. He was hers when he kissed her and brought her home and gave her a second library and smiled at the picnic she made him and let her sleep curled up next him on a couch. He’s hers, and she will never give him up.

She wants to tell him all of these things (release the great, boiling surge of emotion and determination and grief seething within her, threatening to carry her away), but she can’t. There are too many words, and it will take a lifetime to say them all, and both of them are near to shattering, so in the end, she only tells him the most important thing of all.

“I _will_ see you again,” she promises him.

And finally (so soon, so incredibly soon after all she has done to him), he remembers how to smile. A watery, weak smile shining faintly through tears. But it is a smile, and this, too, is hers, for her alone.

And he pulls her forward, and she presses toward him, and then, so very terribly late, she gives him the kiss she’s been waiting to give him since standing on opposite sides of a town line. He holds on desperately, possessively, and she matches him, move for move, thought for thought—and she is Belle, not Lacey, but they are matched anyway, dark shadows shot through with light, magic grounded to reality, space and stars next to clouds and blue skies, contrasted one against the other but so very similar, neither one possible without the other.

If she could freeze time, in that moment, with his lips so warm and insistent on hers and her form held secure and safe against his, she would. She would freeze it and she would stay there for days, for weeks, for months, long enough to memorize his every move, his every breath, his every inch of skin, his every layer.

But she is only a single ordinary woman, and eventually she has to pull away.

His brow rests against hers, for just a moment, but it is enough. 

Because he’s not letting go either.

So she is strong (because he was strong enough to face Lacey, over and over again). And she is brave (because he was brave enough to keep coming for her in the hospital). And she walks away (because he walked away to find his son, but he came back, and one day, he will again).

Her shoulders shake with sobs, her cheeks are wet with tears, her heart is cracked down the middle, but she is wrapped in the coat he gave her, and there was the barest sliver of hope in his eyes when she dared to stop long enough to tell him that his son would be proud of him, and even if he is gone, he still touches her.

It’s enough, for now, until the day he returns and takes her once more into his arms.

And then, she decides, she will wrap him in her arms and she will never walk away again, because she knows only one thing for a certainty.

He’s hers.

\---

The End...at least until Season 3! :)


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